This page is for the decision maker personally. You, the person every open question in the company eventually reaches. I have observed many times that the person who most needs to reorganise their deciding is exactly the person who cannot spare twenty minutes to read about it; when the desk is full, an essay about the desk is one more item on it.
So this is not an essay. Below are the situations I meet most often around a loaded desk, phrased the way they tend to sound from inside. Find the ones that sound like your week and skip the rest. Each comes with what it usually means and how to navigate it, and a pointer to the article where the thinking is developed, for when you do have the twenty minutes. The page runs in three passes: whether the call is yours, why everything ends up with you, and putting part of it down. None of it is a method (your desk and mine are not the same desk). The one claim underneath it all is a sorting claim. You are deciding too much, and more of it than you would guess was never yours to decide; the relief comes from sorting, not from coping.
Whether the call is yours
“This landed an hour ago and it already feels urgent.”
What it usually means. A meaningful share of what arrives is a pressure system wearing decision-shaped clothing (not really a decision, not really yours, not really urgent in the way it arrived). The urgency sits in the pressure, not in the question.
How to navigate. Hold the item apart from the pressure before treating it as a call to make, and interrogate the logic it arrived with. Calm logic survives the push; a logic-shaped wrapper breaks down, and the breakdown tells you the decision migrated to you, to ratify rather than to decide. The decision itself is often clear once the air around it is still.
Developed in Abeyance (1 of 3): A Pause on the Pressure and Abeyance (2 of 3): The Interrogation of Logic.
“It is on my desk, so I suppose it is mine.”
What it usually means. Arrival is not ownership. Decisions drift upward by default, through deference and habit, and the desk collects what others set down.
How to navigate. Ask two things of the item. Does it matter, and does it have margin. Reserve your attention for the calls that have both, and hand back the ones that should never have been there, even when handing back is slower than handling.
Developed in Abeyance (1 of 3): A Pause on the Pressure.
“Turning any of it away feels like failure.”
What it usually means. You are treating two different refusals as one. Refusing a call only you can make is failure; refusing one that migrated to you by default is judgement. The two look identical from the outside.
How to navigate. Draw the line consciously, decision by decision. Nobody else can see where it falls, so nobody else can draw it.
Developed in Abeyance (2 of 3): The Interrogation of Logic.
Why everything ends up with you
“Carrying the big calls is what I am valued for.”
What it usually means. Held decisions work like credentials; nobody advances by writing that they passed the big calls to their colleagues. The incentive is real, and it quietly teaches you to absorb calls that should have stayed elsewhere.
How to navigate. Name the incentive for what it is, and keep what holding calls does for your standing separate from what it does to your judgement.
Developed in Abeyance (2 of 3): The Interrogation of Logic.
“Nothing moves here unless it passes through me. The team is better than ever, and they still wait.”
What it usually means. Part of it is a habit you trained. Guidance, given often enough and in enough detail, stops being guidance and becomes approval, and the dependency deepens as the team gets better; the constraint is the approval loop, no longer their capability. The rest is design. Being the single point of passage, more than the volume of the work, is what wears a decision maker down, and it leaves the organisation fragile (nobody keeps a spare decision maker just in case).
How to navigate. Treat the overload as an organisational design problem rather than a stamina problem, and fix the structure between decisions; structures rarely let themselves be fixed during one. The waiting can be untrained, and the next pass is the untraining.
Developed in Decision Detox and Nobody Keeps a Decision Maker Just in Case.
Putting part of it down
“The holiday rested my body and not the part that was tired.”
What it usually means. What you need is a break from deciding, and that is not the same thing as a break from work. When choosing dinner at home has become one decision too many, the tired part is the deciding part, and time off work does not reach it on its own.
How to navigate. Build the lightest version first. Move the timeline so that nothing falls due while you are away and nobody is left waiting, which also means not starting the things that would generate the next round of decisions. Nothing pending, nobody waiting.
Developed in Decision Detox.
“If I step back, who catches the mistakes?”
What it usually means. The team cannot practise deciding while you remain the reviewer of everything; your presence is the safety net that stops the learning.
How to navigate. Step out of one key decision and watch how they perform. Observer, not reviewer, while staying explicitly accountable for whatever they decide. You will learn more about your people in that one act than in a year of reports.
Developed in Decision Detox.
“I trust them, and I still keep checking.”
What it usually means. Knowing invites intervening. As long as the details keep reaching you, the pull to step in will win often enough, and one attempt at stepping back was never going to settle it; confidence and trust build slowly (it took the cofounder in Decision Detox several rounds).
How to navigate. The heavier version is to hand over a whole project and keep yourself deliberately ignorant of it. The less you know, the less you feel the need to intervene. Repeat it, short and light first, longer and heavier each round, until your role has shrunk to catching the irrecoverable mistakes and leaving the recoverable ones alone. It works when trust runs in both directions; you trust the team to represent the business, and they trust that they are learning from mistakes rather than carrying the blame for them.
Developed in Decision Detox.
“Some decisions I cared about have gone quiet on me.”
What it usually means. Under constant pressure, important calls get minimised, sometimes by people who do it to you on purpose. Overload does not only tire you; it hides things from you.
How to navigate. Use the attention you recover to bring the pended decisions back into view. Sorting the desk is what makes them visible again.
Developed in Decision Detox.
What not to take from this
Two cautions, because a page this compressed can be misread. This is not a wellness argument; the point of the rest is not that you come back refreshed, it is that the organisation learns to stand without you. And it is not an argument against responsibility; the inability to let go is part of what makes a decision maker good (I am not exempt), and the discipline is knowing which of the weights you carry is load-bearing.
Some of what is on the desk only you can carry, and carrying that part well is the job. In my experience the remainder, once the borrowed weight has gone back to where it belongs, is smaller than it feels this week, although there is only one way to find out.
The articles behind this reference
Abeyance (1 of 3): A Pause on the Pressure. Separating a decision from the pressure system around it, and knowing which calls deserve room.
Abeyance (2 of 3): The Interrogation of Logic. Interrogating the logic, the decisions that migrate upward, and the line between failure and judgement.
Decision Detox. Building a break from deciding, from moving the timeline to the deliberately unwatched project.
Nobody Keeps a Decision Maker Just in Case. Why the organisation cannot catch an overloaded decider on its own, and what a third eye is for.
