Most of us think of decisions as moments when something changes:
Those are the moments that attract our attention because they’re visible. We can point to them afterwards and say, “That’s when things changed.”
What receives far less attention is everything that happens when we decide not to decide.
Because it doesn’t feel like a decision at all.
It feels like leaving things exactly as they are.
And that’s where I think many of us get caught.
The Story We Tell Ourselves About Doing Nothing
I thought postponing a decision was a way of keeping my options open.
If I didn’t make a move, then nothing really changed.
The situation stayed where it was.
The decision remained available.
I could always come back to it later when I had more information, more confidence or a clearer sense of what I wanted.
At least that’s how it felt.
Now I can see there was an assumption hiding underneath that thinking.
I was treating the present as though it could be preserved.
As though life would hold everything in place while I worked things out: The role would still be there. The opportunity would still be there. The version of me making the decision would still be there.
And yet I’d never have expected anything else in life to behave that way.
Relationships change.
Priorities change.
People change.
But when it came to difficult decisions, I often acted as though standing still somehow protected me from change.
I don’t think that’s unusual.
Most of us aren’t trying to avoid progress.
We’re trying to avoid making a mistake.
The problem is that life keeps moving whether we participate in those changes or not.
Standing Still Is Not The Same As Staying The Same
I used to describe stability as one of my goals.
Not excitement.
Not adventure.
Stability.
There was a lot of comfort in that idea. Stability suggested predictability. It suggested a future that could be reasonably mapped out and managed. What I didn’t fully appreciate at the time was that stability and stillness are not the same thing.
For a long time,I treated them as though they were.
As though avoiding a decision somehow protected the situation from changing while I worked out what to do.
But life doesn’t seem particularly interested in holding its position for us.
The role changes.
The organisation changes.
The relationship changes.
Sometimes we change too.
Often so gradually that we only recognise it afterwards.
That’s what I misunderstood: I wasn’t choosing between change and no change.
I was choosing whether to participate in changes that were happening anyway.
And those are not the same thing.
The Cost We Rarely Notice
What I didn’t appreciate at the time was that trying to preserve the present came with consequences of its own.
I wasn’t freezing anything in place.
I was simply choosing not to participate in changes that were happening anyway.
That’s the part I missed.
I assumed the situation would still be waiting for me once I’d worked everything out.
That I could return to it later and make a decision from exactly the same starting point.
That was never really true.
The situation kept evolving.
Sometimes the changes were obvious. More often they were gradual enough that I barely noticed them at the time:
- A possibility that once felt exciting slowly became less relevant.
- A conversation became harder to start than it would have been six months earlier.
- Something I had genuinely intended to revisit eventually became part of the background.
None of those moments felt dramatic: that’s why they’re so easy to miss.
When a decision goes badly, we tend to notice the consequences immediately.
When a decision is postponed, the consequences often arrive quietly and spread themselves across months or years.
By the time we recognise them, they no longer look like consequences at all.
They simply look like the life we ended up with.
The Future Is Not Waiting For Us
This is where many of us accidentally misunderstand what standing still actually means.
I thought postponing a decision gave me more time.
And in one sense it did.
What it didn’t do was hold everything else in place while I used that time.
I can see that I wasn’t really expecting the future to wait for me.
I was expecting the present to stay where I’d left it:
But that’s rarely how life works.
The future isn’t something that arrives once we’ve finally made up our minds.
It’s being shaped all the time: Circumstances change. People change. We change.
Sometimes so gradually that it’s easy to miss until we’re looking back.
The version of life you’ll be living six months from now is already taking shape.
Not only through the decisions you make.
But through the decisions you continue to postpone.
The future arrives either way.
The question is whether you’re helping shape it or simply discovering what it became while you were waiting.
So what?
I sometimes wonder how many people believe they’re choosing between action and inaction when they’re actually choosing between two different futures.
One future emerges because of a decision.
The other emerges because the decision was never made.
Neither is neutral.
Neither is consequence-free.
The difference is that one feels like a choice and the other often disguises itself as patience.
Perhaps that’s why standing still can feel so comfortable in the short term.
It allows us to avoid the discomfort of deciding while quietly accumulating consequences of its own.
Most of which only become visible when we look back.
Your Next Step
The future is being shaped whether you decide or not.
If you’ve been postponing a decision because staying where you are feels safer, it may be worth asking a different question.
What if standing still isn’t actually standing still?
From Thinking to Doing isn’t about making dramatic changes. It’s for the point when you’re ready to stop leaving something entirely in your head, choose one thing to begin, and work with what happens once you do.
What’s Coming Next?
Later this week we’ll explore something even more uncomfortable.
The possibility that waiting isn’t always about timing.
Sometimes it’s about hoping somebody or something else will eventually make the decision easier.
People Also Ask
Is doing nothing still a decision?
In many situations, yes. Choosing not to act often shapes future outcomes just as much as taking action.
Why does staying where I am feel safer?
Because the risks of action are usually visible, while the risks of inaction tend to emerge gradually over time.
What is the hidden cost of standing still?
The hidden cost is the future that develops while important decisions are postponed.
How do I know if I’m delaying a decision?
A useful question is whether waiting is creating new information or simply postponing a choice that already needs to be made.
References
Godefroid, M, Plattfaut, R and Niehaves, B (2022) How to Measure the Status Quo Bias? A Review of Current Literature. Management Review Quarterly.
Han, Q, Quadflieg, S and Ludwig, C (2023) Decision Avoidance and Post-Decision Regret: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. PLOS ONE.
Samuelson, W and Zeckhauser, R (1988) Status Quo Bias in Decision Making. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty.
