Thread by @adamhjk

One of the most difficult things for me to manage when I became a leader is the timing of decisions. You must spend some of your time looking at the strategic landscape, orienteering, essentially. This work is almost always many steps ahead of your actual problem.

In my life, when I'm spending a lot of time thinking about what I want to happen many steps down the line - that's when anxiety starts. What if X happens, or Y? The further out I am from my span of control (decisions I can actually make, things I can impact), the worse it gets.

One of the most important things I learned at having a very long run at Chef is: the next obstacle is always critical. If you don't solve it, bad things will happen. Solving it is about making a choice and then working hard to make it the right one.

When you smooth out the day to day ride, it turns out that the number of strategic decisions that truly matter are very small. Most of them happen really early on. After that it tends to be refinement, because your velocity carries you forward inexorably.

So back to when to make decisions. As a person, I tend to want to make them quickly, and change my mind if I'm wrong. It turns out making decisions about things that don't matter is a way for me to feel like I have some control over the uncontrollable.

If the critical problem in front of me is shipping software, the temptation to make a bunch of decisions about what happens *after* I ship software (I'm not talking planning - I'm talking decisions!) is very high. It feels good! Decisive!

But it turns out it isn't. It's wasted energy. It's the equivalent windmilling your arms around when you are running a marathon. It might feel good or whatever, but it's not conserving your energy for later. And there is always a later.

Learning to let go of those decisions until they are ripe has been a very difficult skill for me to learn. But it's the one that has probably had the most positive impact on my career and absolutely my life outside my job. I carry less stress. I can focus more.

If you find yourself worrying about the future, and feeling like you need to start taking action - ask yourself if the action your taking results in moving that immediate constraint. That's where your decisions need to be. The rest will come in its own due time.

Because I'm a person who loves a pithy platitude, I usually talk about this as finding "safety in the work", rather than "safety in the plan". I don't know if my plans will work. I don't know if my decision was right or wrong - won't know, usually, till much later.

What I know is that I can do the work. Day in day out. Making the best decisions I can with the information I have. Let go of trying to control the future. I have to get my control fix from the work itself. Because in the end, that's what it will all boil down to.

People also talk about this as "execution eats strategy for breakfast", etc etc. But to be more tactical: practice making fewer decisions, and delaying decisions longer. You'll thank me for it.