You've Made This Decision Before
The cost isn't making it wrong. It's making it again.
Two weeks ago I rebuilt an email I have definitely written before. Not edited, sadly rebuilt. From a blank document, from memory, from scratch. Forty minutes. I sent it, felt good about it, moved on.
Then I realized it was the third time I’d done that. Same situation, same email, same forty minutes. Not because I forgot I’d written it but because I’d never made it a template. Never captured it anywhere it could actually be used again.
That’s not a time management problem. That’s not even really a documentation problem. It’s a compounding tax on work you’ve already done that’s paid over and over because you never extracted the value from it the first time.
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Here’s what I think is actually happening.
Most of us know how to handle the recurring situations in our business. The scope question that comes up every engagement. The timeline push. The client request that lands just outside what you agreed to. We know what we think. We make the same judgment call, well, every time.
We just make it from scratch every time, too.
Same with pricing new work. Same with onboarding. Same with the first email after a difficult conversation. You’ve been here. You know what works. And then the situation comes around again and you reconstruct the whole thing from memory because the answer lives in your head and nowhere else.
That’s the tax. Not the time it takes to do the thing. The time it takes to re-derive the thing you already knew.
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The difference between a decision and a standard.
A decision is something you make. A standard is something you made once and now apply.
That framing shifted something for me. Because the goal isn’t to turn everything into a rigid rule. It really is to stop spending your best thinking on questions you’ve already answered. The proposal template isn’t about being faster. It’s about not starting from zero. The onboarding checklist isn’t about being thorough. It’s about not having to reconstruct your own judgment from memory every time someone new comes in.
Every time you catch yourself thinking I know how this goes, that’s a signal. That’s a standard waiting to be written down. And every standard you write down is a decision you never have to make again.
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What I’ve been doing about this.
I started a running document I’m calling my standards library.Unglamorous name but an extremely useful thing.
Every time I catch myself making a decision I’ve made before, I write it down before I move on. The pricing logic. The scope language. The way I handle certain client requests.
It takes five extra minutes in the moment. It’s saved me significantly more than that already and I’m two months in.
The harder part was noticing. Most of us have been carrying these standards in our heads for so long we don’t see them as standards anymore. They feel like instinct. They feel like just knowing what to do. They are but instinct that lives only in your head can’t be used by anyone else, can’t be built on, and has to be reconstructed from scratch every time your brain is full or you’re thirty minutes between school drop-off and your first call.
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One thing before you go.
What’s the decision in your business that you make most often from scratch? The one where you always think I know how this goes and then figure it out again anyway?
That’s your first standard. Write it down this week. It doesn’t need a home yet. A note in your phone counts.
Hit reply and tell me what it is. I want to know what people are carrying around in their heads that should be somewhere they can actually use it.
— Nicki
Marlowe Strategies publishes every Tuesday. Subscribe at marlowestrategies.substack.com or on my site https://www.marlowestrategies.com/