Twenty white t-shirts, and one deleted decision

A few weeks ago I stood in a Costco and put twenty identical white t-shirts in the trolley.

This is not a story about a man who has given up. I like clothes and I have opinions about them. What I do not like is the small daily task of working out what to wear, which costs me a few minutes and a little attention every morning of my life.

So I stopped getting better at it. I removed it.

Look at what I did not do. I did not build a better system for choosing an outfit. I did not lay clothes out the night before. I did not get organised. There is nothing left to choose. The shirt is white. The next shirt is also white.

That is the difference between managing a decision and deleting one. It sounds like a small distinction. In a business it is the whole game.

Here is a pair of blocks almost every service business already owns. A booking tool, so people can pick a slot themselves. An email system, so people hear from you. Both good. Both paid for.

Now watch the gap between them. Someone books an appointment on Tuesday night. On Friday they get an email asking whether they are still thinking about booking.

Nobody did anything wrong. The booking tool did its job. The email system did exactly what it was told. The two of them have simply never been introduced, so the business is talking to a customer it already has as though they were a stranger.

The fix is small. The booking event tells the email system to stop that sequence and start a different one. Confirmation, then a reminder, then a thank you, then the review ask. One afternoon of wiring, and it runs for years without anyone remembering it exists.

The instinct goes the other way. Try harder. Be more on top of it. Check the inbox more often. That is the wrong lever, because it makes you the system, and you are the busiest part of your own business. If it lives in someone's head, it is not a system yet.

There is a half people get wrong, though. Deleting the shirt decision cost me nothing, because what I wear says nothing about who I am.

Other decisions I would not hand over for anything. Which clients to take. What to charge. Which work to say no to. Those are not overhead. Those are the business having a personality. Automate them and you have not bought time, you have quietly outsourced the thing that made anyone want to work with you.

So the question is not how much you can automate. It is which decisions are actually yours.