Dispatches
Evergreen writing from the studio. Read when the operational moment is genuinely available.
21 October 2026
Kill Criteria: Decide When to Stop Before You Start
Kill criteria are exit conditions written before a project begins, while your judgement is still clean. Once you are invested, the investment bends every test you apply, and the decision to stop becomes close to impossible to make well.
14 October 2026
What Decisions Should You Let AI Agents Make?
An AI agent that acts on your behalf is making decisions whether or not you handed them over. Sort every call into three tiers (prepare, own, escalate) and write down the threshold where the agent must hand back.
7 October 2026
How Much Analysis Is Enough? Sort the Decision by What It Costs to Undo
Most decisions can be reversed cheaply, yet most of us run the same heavy process on all of them. Sorting by cost to reverse, before you deliberate, returns capacity to the few calls that cannot be undone.
30 September 2026
Your AI Stack Did Not Save You Time. It Added Decisions.
You adopted heavily and cannot point to the hours back. The problem is not that the tools are weak. It is that every tool you add arrives with its own decisions attached, and you bought capability without buying structure.
23 September 2026
Decision Debt Is Not One Delayed Call. It Is the Dozen You Are Still Carrying.
Every decision you have raised but not closed is still charging you. Not as a single visible error, but as a standing cost on your week. Named and counted, it can be cleared.
16 September 2026
The Meeting Is Not the Cost. The Recovery Is.
The thirty minutes on the calendar is the visible price of a meeting. The degraded hour that follows it is the real one, and it compounds quietly because nothing in your diary is built to record it.
9 September 2026
Deciding Fast Is Not the Opposite of Deciding Well
When the clock is short, speed and judgement feel like opposites. They only compete when the decision was never structured beforehand. What looks like panic under pressure is almost always a general question being asked for the first time at the worst possible moment.
7 September 2026
You Are Not Out of Time. You Are Out of Bandwidth.
Cleared afternoons and protected calendars do not produce strategic thinking, because time was never the constraint. Cognitive capacity is, and it is spent long before you sit down to use it.
20 August 2026
The AI Agreed With You. It Was Trained To.
You put the decision to the model and it came back on your side. It was always going to. What the evidence says about how often AI validates a call it should challenge, why it is built that way, and the one change that makes its agreement stop mattering.
17 August 2026
You Delegated the Task. You Kept the Decision.
The work goes out and the choice comes back. Handing someone a task without handing over the authority inside it guarantees a return leg — and the return leg is the part that was costing you.
7 August 2026
The Best Time to Make a Decision Is Before You Need It
The advice says decide in the morning; the decisions arrive when they like. The clock is real, but the fix is structural — rule the recurring calls in advance, and give the rest a fixed slot instead of the worst hour of the day.
22 July 2026
Analysis Paralysis Is Not a Perfectionism Problem
The high performer rerunning the same comparison for the tenth time is not being careful. Every option held open costs working memory the actual work needs, and the fix is a rule decided in advance, not one more pass at the data.
14 July 2026
Firefighting Is Not a Focus Problem
Founders who never get to strategic work rarely lack discipline. They are running a structure where every problem arrives as an emergency and every decision routes to one person. The fix is architectural, not motivational.
7 July 2026
You Are Not Missing Information. You Are Avoiding the Decision.
The decision you keep deferring is rarely waiting on data. You already have what you need, and the delay is doing something for you. What it costs is the thing worth naming.
7 July 2026
Which Kind of Decision Problem Do You Actually Have?
Most people think they are bad at decisions. Really they have one of three specific problems — a stalled strategic call, a daily queue that never clears, or a number they are avoiding. Which one you have decides what fixes it.
5 July 2026
Decision Fatigue Is Not a Willpower Problem
The exhaustion you feel by late afternoon is not a character defect. It is a system running out of a resource, and no amount of resolve refills it. What changes the outcome is structure.