← Back to archive

Procrastination Disguised as Research: Ship Decisions Faster

20 May 2026 · 31 views · 0 likes · 0 reposts · 144 blog views

Content Startups decision-making leadership procrastination product

The smartest way to procrastinate is to call it "research".

Mark Manson named the mechanic cleanly: Beware: learning more is a smart person's favorite form of procrastination.

I love rereading Seneca - he pointed that 2,000 years earlier: It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.

Do you see it? Same pattern - smart people manufacturing complexity so the decision feels too big to make today.

I spent years consulting at Binitex, in rooms with owners, CEOs, and C-level operators across very different companies/sectors/stages. The shocking part wasn't the variety of problems but the sameness of the avoidance.

The pattern I kept seeing:

  • smart team and clear bottleneck
  • a decision that should take 48 hours sitting open for 90 days
  • another analysis ordered, we need more demo'd, we need another framework forwarded
  • the deeper the expertise in the room ....... the longer the delay.

In the operator world today, the same mechanic shows up as:

  • the AI strategy in "evaluation" for three quarters
  • the hire that's been "scoping" since last fiscal year
  • the pricing change waiting on "more data"
  • the pilot that quietly became a reading group

The receipt: one stalled strategic decision at $10M ARR costs roughly one FTE-equivalent per quarter. Not the work the team did the work they didn't, because nobody knew which direction they were rowing.

The rule that breaks the pattern:

➡️ IF a decision has been open more than 10 days, the bottleneck is no longer information... the BOTTLENECK is the DECISION ITSELF ⬅️

The smartest operators I work with don't read less.

They just promote action above input. They ship the v1, then read the book. They run the pilot, then watch the talk. They make the call, then refine the model.

If your last quarter was full of interesting reads and short on shipped decisions, that wasn't a learning quarter.

That was a procrastination quarter, dressed up in better vocabulary.

Procrastination Disguised as Research: Ship Decisions Faster

Originally posted on X

PS: I'm pretty active on 𝕏 if you'd like to follow along

Related posts

Archive

2026

2025

2024

2018