# Completed staff work: a problem with a recommendation [Home](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en) › [Study](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en/study) › [Articles](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en/study/articles) author: [Axel Jedlitschka](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en/about) published: 2026-10-13 updated: 2026-10-13 language: en reading time: 5 min topic: Personal source booklet: [Where the Day Went](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en/shop/introduction/personal-order-time) When someone brings you a bare question, you do their work on your time. Completed staff work arrives with a recommendation, so all that is left for you is to approve or decline. **Completed staff work** is a request that arrives with everything needed, a recommendation included, so the person receiving it only has to approve or disapprove. According to the source, when it is missing, whoever receives the problem has to assemble the information himself, and ends up doing the work of the person who sent it. ## What completed staff work is The source devotes a whole letter to this. It takes an old term, completed staff work, and uses it to reduce needless traffic and speed up action. By its definition, this is an assembled package of information about a situation, a plan or an emergency, forwarded complete enough that the receiver needs to do nothing except approve or disapprove. That is the threshold. Enough information does not clear it, and neither does general context. **The request has to arrive in a state where it can be answered with a yes or a no.** If the receiver has to come back with one more question, the request was not complete. The source also describes the opposite, as a symptom: problems brought to seniors in place of completed staff work, which always includes a recommendation. Suppose an employee asks the owner what to do about a customer who wants a refund. Now the owner has to find out who the customer is, how much he wants and why. When the same employee writes down all the details and adds what he suggests, the answer takes a second. Or an owner who writes to her accountant only that she has a question about VAT. Four emails later, they get to the question itself. ## What it costs you when it is missing The source describes exactly what happens on the receiving end. Someone sends a skimpy piece of information and demands a solution. More information is needed than was presented, so the receiver must take over that person's hat, meaning his role, and assemble the missing data with his own time and lines. Everything slows down, his lines, already loaded, go to information assembly, and a feeling of emergency sets in. Much of the frustration you feel toward people who come to you starts here. Each of them asks for little, and each such request leaves you with most of the work. The source's wording is to take over the person's hat. In practice, when someone brings you a question with no background, you do his job on your own time, and only after that do you reach the decision. It works in both directions. Every time you send a supplier, an accountant or a lawyer a question without the background, you do exactly this to them. Suppose an owner complains that his accountant is slow. Each enquiry of his needs three clarifying messages before it can even be answered. When he starts sending complete enquiries, the response time falls from two days to two hours. ## The recommendation is the hard part According to the source, completed staff work is built from a closed list of parts, and all of them are needed. For most people the hardest part is the recommendation. To recommend is to say what you think should be done. Two options tossed to the other side to choose between do not count as a recommendation. For a junior, saying what he thinks should be done feels bold. It is exactly the part that makes your request worth answering. Suppose an installer who writes to a supplier that the part that arrived does not fit, and asks what to do. Four days of messages follow. Another time he writes the same thing, attaches photos and the order number, and suggests which part to send instead and how to return the old one. The part arrives the next day. Or an owner who asks his team to make every enquiry arrive complete. The number of enquiries falls by a third, and their quality goes up. ## Why it is good for the person who brings the problem The source gives a second reason, and it is stronger than the first. When a junior brings a problem and a senior solves it, that creates needless traffic, because the person who brought the problem will usually not use the solution anyway. This argument concerns the outcome. A person does not really carry out a solution he did not think of himself. He carries it out partway, or comes back later to say that it did not work. Suppose an owner solves a software problem for her employee, and the same problem comes back twice, because the employee never understood the solution. The next time, she asks what the employee has tried and what she suggests. The solution differs from the one the owner would have picked, and it works. Elsewhere the source phrases this as a rule: when a problem turns up, it goes up the line **only** together with a complete recommendation on how to deal with it. The word that carries the weight is the one in bold. ## What the booklet has on this The chapter this article draws on breaks completed staff work down into its parts and shows what happens without each one. It has two exercises: the four parts, and the requirement. After them comes a self-check. If you spend your day answering questions that arrive with no background, check how much of your time goes to work that should have reached you already done. - [Where the Day Went](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en/shop/introduction/personal-order-time): Names for what eats the day, a sort you can mark against, and one structure that takes twenty minutes to set up. --- [עברית](https://theonlyaxelj.com/he/study/articles/bring-a-problem-with-a-recommendation) · [Español](https://theonlyaxelj.com/es/study/articles/bring-a-problem-with-a-recommendation)