How to decide what to drop

Updated 2026-09-12

The short answer

When more is committed than can be done, something is not happening. That is already true. The only open question is whether it is chosen now or discovered later — and discovered later is always more expensive, because by then other people have planned around it.

Six questions, in order. Stop at the first that gives an answer:

1. What has no real deadline? Not "no date" — no consequence attached to the date.
2. What can be done later at the same cost? Some work is genuinely time-insensitive. Move it, do not cut it.
3. What is nearly done? Finish those. A nearly-finished item is the cheapest remaining value on the list.
4. What can be smaller instead of gone? Half of many things is more useful than none of them.
5. What is nobody waiting for? Work blocking a person costs more than the same work in isolation.
6. What would you not start today, knowing what you now know? The honest one.

Cut scope before quality

This is the most important line in the article.

Doing all of it badly feels like keeping your commitments and is usually the worst available outcome: nothing is finished to a standard anyone can use, and the effort is spent anyway. Doing less of it properly produces something usable and an honest conversation about the rest.

Question 4 is where most of the value is. "Smaller" beats "gone" far more often than people assume — the two-page version instead of the twenty, the three numbers instead of the analysis, the fix instead of the rewrite. Ask what the person actually needs rather than what was originally scoped; the answer is frequently a fraction of it.

Tell someone, early, specifically

A cut nobody knows about is not a decision, it is a surprise with a delay on it.

Say the specific thing and the specific date. "The competitor section will not be in Thursday's deck. It can be there by the 20th if it is still wanted." That is actionable. "I'm running behind" is not, and it invites a conversation about you rather than about the work.

Say it while it is early. The value of this information decays fast. On Monday it lets someone re-plan; on Thursday morning it is a problem you have handed them.

Propose the cut rather than asking for permission. "Unless you'd rather otherwise, I'll drop X" — most of the time it is simply accepted, and you have resolved it without a meeting. You are asking for an objection, not a decision.

What not to drop

Anything blocking another person. Even if it is small and boring. Especially then — a two-minute reply can be holding up a week.

Anything nearly finished. The remaining cost is small and the value is the whole thing. Dropping at eighty percent loses the eighty percent too.

The review. The first thing to go under pressure is the fifteen minutes that would have told you this was coming. That is the wrong economy: the review is where planning becomes estimating, and dropping it guarantees the same surprise next month.

Everything that has no deadline, all at once. Undated work already starves by default. Cutting it in a busy week is the loud queue taking the last of the quiet one's space, and it is how a quarter passes with nothing important moving.

The check afterwards

If you are cutting every week, the problem is not selection — it is that the inflow exceeds capacity, and no ordering rule creates hours. That is worth showing someone with two weeks of planned against actual, which is checkable, rather than describing it, which is not. Naming the displacement rather than your capacity.

Where to go next

• What to do when you have too much to do — telling a capacity problem from an ordering one
• How to say no to more work — before it is on the list
• How to prioritise your tasks — the three conditions

Using this in Decide One

Decide One shows the day's committed time against the hours in it, so the moment the arithmetic stops working is visible at the start of the day rather than at the end of it — which is the only point at which a cut is cheap.

A line you did not finish is unfinished. It is not marked against you, and a day you did not open is not counted.

Open Decide One — free to use, with no account. Nothing you write leaves your device.