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People ignore opportunity cost because only the yes arrives with a price attached. Every yes is also a no to something else, but the value of the option you didn't take never shows up in the accounts, so it's easy to treat as nothing.
The fix is a question you have to ask on purpose: "If I say yes, what will I have to say no to?" The answer often goes beyond money to the time, attention or goodwill the new commitment will quietly draw on.
Then put the answer beside the gain, in the same terms. Set the yes and its next-best alternative side by side, in money, hours or customers, and the comparison you were about to skip becomes the decision itself.
Opportunity cost hides in decisions that look free. A new client, a side project or a favour for a colleague each takes capacity from something already running, and the loss surfaces later, somewhere nobody connects back to the yes.
Delay carries an opportunity cost too. While a decision sits open, the options it was meant to choose between keep moving, which is why slow decisions on calls you could easily reverse can cost more than a wrong one would have.
A year after the 2001 Ideal Home Exhibition, Claire took her stand to a different supplier, and the decision that cost us her business was made at my office door. Claire, a former employee, had won a stand at the month-long London show and asked us to supply it from her own forecast.
Half the stock went with her at the start, and the rest was meant to follow as top-ups over four weeks. Her order at the end of the first week took all of it, and she still needed more. Every extra unit we sent her was a unit our own shops could sell at double the profit.
Tony, our warehouse manager, knocked on my door with the shop orders and Claire's set against our stock, and asked who should take priority. I told him the shops. He raised his eyebrows: "Claire won't like this."
She didn't. She soon worked out what was happening, and every day the conversations got more heated.
Dave, our MD, found the way out: if a supplier would extend our credit, we could buy enough stock for the show and the shops, and because Claire paid us sooner than we had to pay the supplier, the cash flow would hold. Terms were agreed within a day and the extra orders went in that week. The trade-off was gone, but the days of putting the shops first had already done their damage, and that was the cost I hadn't priced when I answered Tony.