Add work or remove work?

Hi Everyone,

There are two kinds of approvals. The ones that need your judgment, and the ones that keep coming to you because nobody has written down simple rules to guide the decision-making.

Today we're sharing a question from Basecamp's decision-making guide that tells you which is which - plus a playbook you can complete this weekend to accelerate decision-making in your company.

The question Basecamp asks

Basecamp's decision-making guide asks one specific question before any call:

Will this decision eliminate the need to make other decisions, or will it create the necessity to make even more?

It's a question that's easy to miss. Usually, we focus on whether a decision is the right call. The other half of the work is what the decision does to your future workload and your team's.

A McKinsey survey of more than 1,200 managers found that 61% of the time spent on decisions is wasted.

A lot of the waste comes from the same three things:

• The wrong people get asked to decide
• Approvals exist that shouldn't
• The same question gets answered again and again because nobody wrote the answer down the first time

Decisions that add work

These are the ones that feel productive in the moment but create more work later.

• Approving an exception without writing it into a rule. The next person who asks will also come to you, and so will the one after that.
• Saying yes to a new meeting without naming who owns the outcome. Someone will raise the same topic again and nobody will remember what was agreed.
• Approving something your team could handle on their own. When a manager keeps asking you to sign off on things they could sign off on themselves, give them the authority instead.
• Answering a one-off question in Slack when the answer should be written somewhere your team can find it later.

Each of these adds three or four future decisions for every one you make now.

Decisions that remove work

These take longer up front but save you and your team the same work later.

• Setting a default: Meeting length of 25 minutes, vendor payment terms at net 30, approval threshold at $10,000, expense reports due Friday at noon. Once they're set, nobody asks.
• Publishing a framework: A hiring rubric, kill criteria for projects, a short list of when to escalate, or a clear threshold for when to involve legal.
• Picking a company standard: A single CRM, one planning tool, a default data format, or an onboarding flow everyone uses.
• Writing down who owns what: A short list of who decides what gives your team permission to act without checking.

Last but not least, research in behavioral economics has consistently found that creating "default options" strongly influence people's choices. For example, when the US switched to auto-enrolling employees in 401(k) plans, participation climbed from roughly 35% to 90%. People could still opt out, and few did.

Try this today

Most recurring approvals fit one of five categories. We've built a Decision Defaults Playbook that walks you through each one, with starter decision threshold tables you can fill in with your own numbers.

Pick the category where the most approvals hit your desk each week. Complete that one properly before touching the others. A single published rule used every week is worth more than five half-finished ones nobody has seen.

Access your Decision Defaults Playbook

Go deeper

👉 Basecamp: How we make decisions – the published guide with the question behind this issue, plus a longer list of prompts worth stealing.

👉 Jeff Bezos: 2016 Letter to Amazon Shareholders – the two-way door framework, plus why most decisions should be made with around 70% of the information you wish you had.

👉 McKinsey: Three keys to faster, better decisions – the research on why most decision time is wasted and what decision-making winners do differently.

👉 Goldstein, Johnson, Herrmann & Heitmann: Nudge Your Customers Toward Better Choices – a Harvard Business Review field guide to setting defaults, hosted as a non-paywalled PDF by one of the authors.

Coming up tomorrow

Tomorrow we're looking at a rule that separates companies that double in value from those that stand still.

P.S. What's one decision you keep making over and over that should be a default by now?