First sent to Fieldstone Letter subscribers on 6 September 2026.
Think of the last decision that actually mattered. Not the calendar shuffle, not the approve-and-move-on. The one with real money or real people in it. Now try to remember where you were when you finally made it. Almost nobody answers “in the meeting where it was discussed.”
There is a reason for that, and it is not a character flaw. Deciding is a different kind of work from discussing. Discussion happens at speed, in company, with your attention held tight to a screen or a room. Deciding needs the opposite: slack in the attention, time that is not metered, and enough quiet for the option you have not thought of yet to surface. Researchers at Columbia found that when people walk while working through a problem, their attention loosens in exactly the way idea generation needs. The state is physical before it is mental.
Most working weeks simply never supply that state. Not because anyone is doing anything wrong, but because the modern week is optimized for throughput, and throughput is the enemy of the one decision that outweighs the other forty. So the big call gets carried, half-made, from Monday to Monday. You know the weight of a decision you have been carrying too long. It does not feel like an open question. It feels like a stone in the bag.
I get my ideas anywhere, screens included. But I cannot decide anything important at a computer. The decisions that shaped this business were made on runs, in the woods, at the archery range, and then written down by hand: the question at the top of a page, the honest options under it, including the option of doing nothing at all. The screen is where I prepare a decision. It has never once been where I made one.
Ideas will find you anywhere. Decisions have to be given somewhere to happen.
Here is the one thing to try this week. Take the single decision you have been carrying longest and refuse to make it at your desk. Write the question by hand on one page, walk out the door with it, and give it thirty unmetered minutes somewhere with a longer horizon than your monitor. Then come back and write the answer under the question, in pen, with a date. You are not adding a productivity trick. You are giving one decision the conditions it has been waiting for. This is the same principle our retreats are built on, and the same one behind the 90-day operating plan every leader will take home from them: the right conditions first, then the commitment in your own hand.
Further reading: You Have Notes. You Do Not Have a Decision. →
The decision you keep carrying is not waiting for more information. It is waiting for room.
Lee