Decisions and delegation

A founder's day is a long series of decisions. Which customer to follow up, what price to set, what color the button should be. Each one seems small, but together they drain you. Learning to make decisions quickly — and to give some of them away — is one of the most underrated productivity skills a founder can have.

Making decisions faster

Many founders agonize over choices that don't really deserve it. You can spend three days choosing the name of a feature, or the tool you'll use, and in the end it barely matters. The time and energy you spend wavering are almost always more expensive than making a good-enough choice and moving on.

A useful rule is to ask how much a perfect choice is worth compared to a good-enough one. For most daily decisions the answer is: almost nothing. Set a time limit in proportion to how important the choice is, make the decision when the limit is reached, and don't look back. Decisiveness is a muscle — the more often you decide quickly on small things, the more energy you have left for the big ones.

Reversible versus irreversible choices

The key to knowing how much time a choice deserves is to ask whether it can be undone. Most decisions are reversible: if you try a price and it doesn't work, you change it. If you pick the wrong tool, you switch. Such choices should be made quickly, because the cost of being wrong is low and you learn most by trying.

A few choices are hard or impossible to reverse: taking on a co-founder, signing a long lease, giving away a large equity stake. These deserve careful thought, advice from someone you trust, and ideally a night's sleep. The art is spending your time correctly — fast on the reversible, slow on the irreversible — instead of spending equal time on everything.

What you should do yourself

As the company grows, the most important skill becomes letting go. You can't do everything yourself, and if you try, you become the bottleneck that slows everything down. The question is not whether you can do a task — you probably can do most of them — but whether you are the right person to do it.

Keep what only you can do: the overall direction, the most important customer relationships, the choices that shape the company. Give away what others can do just as well or better, even if it stings a little to let go. A founder who insists on doing her own bookkeeping to save a few kroner often pays far more in lost time that could have gone to sales.

Delegating without losing control

Many founders are reluctant to delegate because they are afraid it will be done wrong. But delegating is not the same as letting go of everything. It means handing over the task, not the responsibility for reaching the goal. Explain what needs to be achieved and why, agree on when you'll check in, and then let the person find the way themselves.

Picture a founder outsourcing customer service for the first time. If she writes down the most common answers, agrees on a short weekly review and lets the other person handle the rest, she frees up hours every week without losing the overview. Control doesn't come from doing everything yourself, but from having clear goals and good checkpoints.

Do this now

Write down three decisions you have been putting off. Mark each one as reversible or not. Make the reversible ones today, right now, without more deliberation. Then write down one task you do every week that someone else could do, and decide who you can start handing it to.