The cost of doing nothing

It’s been a month in Ghana so far.

My mum is close, my in-laws around, and Aba’s best friend Fiyin’ stayed with us for nearly two weeks. Childcare has been generous. We took the opportunity and went dancing. It has been good. Genuinely good.

But somethings have cost me. Small things, with growing price tags.

The car key battery died early in the trip. A 50 Ghana cedi fix. I told myself I would handle it later. Later became a month, and across that month, Aba and I lost close to an hour between us, standing in heat, rerouting, waiting on a problem I had already decided to solve but never actually solved. I could say the same about the gen. set. But you get the idea.

There was also a project that needed my feedback. 45 uninterrupted minutes and I would have been done. However, I kept approaching it sideways. A glance here, a note there. I never gave it the block it deserved, so the thinking never happened, the project did not move, and I carried it in the back of my mind every single day. I’ll spare you the rest of my list of examples.

Well, that’s the point of this letter.

We have a belief, most of us, that goes unexamined for most of our professional lives. It sounds harmless yet costs us so so much.

The belief is this: doing nothing is a neutral choice.

We imagine that when we decide not to act, we have simply paused the situation. Held our position. Made no move that could be wrong because we made no move at all.

We know better though. The situation kept moving without our input, without our authorship. And in our absence, it made decisions we now have to accept or fight at a later date, with less energy, less time, and less leverage than we had today.

Doing nothing is not neutral. It is often the most expensive decision most of us make, and we make it multiple times a day.

Solomon saw it too.

“A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest - and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want like an armed man.” - Proverbs 24:33-34

Nothing costs the most. And it collects payment across four accounts simultaneously.

The Time Tax. The task now takes longer later. Always. The car key fix that costs five minutes on day one costs an hour by the end of the month. The email not sent this week becomes the relationship repaired next month. The conversation avoided this quarter becomes the crisis navigated next year. The problem does not wait for our decision. It grows while we are making it.

The Energy Tax. We think avoidance saves energy. It is one of the most expensive things we do. Every unresolved thing runs in the background of our minds the way an app runs in the background of a phone, drawing power, slowing everything. The project I was not giving forty five minutes to was receiving far more than forty five minutes from me. It was getting seven days of low grade distraction, the diminished version of me in every other conversation that week. Avoidance does not rest the mind. It taxes it continuously, at a higher rate than action would have.

The Opportunity Tax. Every window has a season. The moment to shape a decision, influence a project, move a relationship forward, take the territory, does not stay open indefinitely. We look up months later and cannot find the single failure that set us back. There was no single failure. There were a hundred small moments where we let things sit, the world kept moving, and the gap became a distance we did not choose.

The Identity Tax. This one bugs me the most.

Every time we avoid something important, we are filing evidence. Building a case, consistently, that we are the kind of person who defers the hard thing. Cases built on enough evidence become verdicts. And verdicts become the story we tell ourselves before we even try. Not “I have not done this yet” but “I am someone who does not do this.” The identity tax is the only one that costs more than our output. It robs us of the belief that something different is possible. And once that belief goes, no framework or routine saves us. We end up fighting the wrong enemy.

When things stay with us, the interest accrues on our account.

Every piece of feedback only we can give. Every decision requiring our sign off. Every relationship we are personally managing. Each one is a line of debt we service every day, whether we act or not. We are not holding things. Things are holding us.

So, I say again. Commit to less. It’s simple maths. Fewer things held at full depth will always outperform more things held at the surface. Delegate not because you cannot do it, but because the cost of it sitting with you is a cost you have not been calculating correctly. And when you do act, protect the block. Shallow work on deep problems gets done twice. Once poorly, once properly.

I am going into this week with a different view of what I have been calling nothing.

Nothing has always been something. Always a choice. Always a cost. We just skip reading the invoice because it comes in a currency we don’t like to track.

There is no neutral position. There is only what we choose, and what that choice costs.

Count the cost, dear friend.

Rooting for you this week,

Sydney

P.S. My team and I host workshops for organisations & accelerator cohorts on leadership, team building and business growth. Would love to connect with a team you know who might need some help, here’s my email : hello@sydneysam.com. You’re awesome 🙏🏼