Three weeks ago, my work started to drift.
I didn't notice it at first. I was producing. Heads down, on schedule, hitting my marks.
The drift was happening underneath the work, not on top of it.
Then the signal surfaced. Quietly. Once, then again the next week, then a third time.
I dug in. Kept producing. Told myself I was busy.
That's what avoidance looks like from the outside. From the inside, it doesn't feel like avoidance at all.
It feels like being busy. It feels like protecting your time. It feels like waiting for clarity that's somehow supposed to arrive on its own.
It doesn't.
The honest move was to stop, reset, and decide what this is for. I didn't stop. I went quiet instead.
Psychologists call that pattern the Zeigarnik effect: unfinished tasks demand more mental bandwidth than completed ones. The avoided decision isn't sitting quietly in the corner of your mind. It's draining you, every day it stays open.
And here's the part most leaders miss.
The decisions you avoid are rarely the ones you don't see. They're the ones you don't want to confront. The product manager who knows the roadmap is wrong but keeps shipping. The founder who knows the hire isn't working but gives them another quarter. The exec who knows the strategy needs a reset but keeps polishing the deck.
You can probably name yours right now. The one you've been carrying for a week, a month, maybe longer.
That weight is costing you. Not just on the decision itself, but on everything else you're trying to think about clearly while it sits there unmade.
This week I'm going to write about that. The cost of unmade decisions. Why thinking about them isn't the same as making them. And what changes when you give one of them ten minutes a day for seven days.
If you want to work through the one you've been avoiding alongside me, I built something for exactly this. It's called One Good Decision. Seven days. One question per day. Ten minutes each. In a week, you'll have made the call.
Tomorrow: the trap that makes thinking feel like deciding.
Darren
P.S. The decision you're avoiding isn't waiting for more information. It's waiting for you to stop.
