F2F #51: Damn the "what if"

First off, apologies for skipping last week's issue. Turns out, sleeping 1-3 hours per night doesn't mix well with keeping deadlines.

I still have a couple of guest posts before I'm back at the helm, but I wanted to send out a quick idea I've had in my mind for a while.

One of the most dangerous habits a founder - or any team, really - can fall into is starting projects "just in case". You know the idea: creating a deck because maybe a client will ask for it, prototyping a feature in case the market shifts that way, or drafting a campaign to be ready when the time comes. On paper, it looks like foresight. In practice, it’s usually waste.

I've personally done all of the above and more. I have created a press kit for MarsBased years before we first appeared on any newspaper. I have optimised the YouTube channel for all sorts of parameters way before we even uploaded more than 5 videos. I have created a complex finance tracking system before I even had substantial money to play with or any kind of portfolio diversification. And so on.

I call these the "what ifs".

What if I created a new community on Discord? What if I moved my newsletter from Mailchimp to Substack? What if I learnt a new framework to see if it's more performant?

The problem is that the world rarely unfolds the way you predict. That landing page you spent two days on never gets published. The prototype is obsolete by the time you show it. The campaign sits in a folder until it’s irrelevant. Meanwhile, you’ve already spent hours of energy, pulled focus away from what actually mattered, and introduced yet another half-finished thing into the company’s mental inventory. It's all clutter that no one ever gets rid of.

The second problem with this mentality starts even before you set out to do the project, commit the first lines of code or write the first article: it's when you store ideas. By storing ideas, I mean creating vague reminders on your notes app, or your to do app, like "write a blog post about remote work". Unless you act on it today or tomorrow, you will lose all kinds of context. Worse, sometimes I've created tasks that have only a link to an article as if I wanted to write an article inspired on that one? or as a reply to that one? I will never know. That task is from 2016.

This is the hidden cost of "what if" projects and tasks: they’re never really small. Even the tiniest preparation task takes time to do, adds weight to your backlog, and creates an open loop that someone has to remember and maintain. People say "it can’t hurt", but it always does. The hurt is subtle: it’s the dilution of focus, the sense of busyness without progress, the cognitive load of carrying work that adds no value.

Unless you define the task really well and set a close deadline, chances are you won't work on that task. The bigger the distance between task creation and task deadline, the more likely it is that you will end up deleting it altogether.

Over the years, I’ve learned to enforce a simple principle: don’t start unless there’s a real trigger with a sense of urgency. That means a signed contract, a specific client request, a concrete opportunity with clear timing. Not a vague "what if". In an ever-changing landscape like that of nowadays, task debt is too heavy of a cross to bear. You will be working on yesterday's tasks without ever having the chance to look forward.

Preparation feels safe, but it’s a trap. Execution feels scarier, but it’s the only thing that creates value.

So when my mind proposes a "just in case" initiative, I’ve trained myself to say: let’s park it until I actually need it. Nine times out of ten, it never comes back up, and the tenth time, you’ll do it faster and better with the clarity of real demand. The company moves faster when you’re not dragging along the weight of projects nobody asked for.

When it comes to personal tasks, I've decided to stop annotating them if I don't do them right away. If they're important, they will keep coming back. The rest is clutter.

In other words: keep your backlog lean, your team focused, and your attention on work that matters today. Damn the "what ifs".