# Why everything you put off gets done twice [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) Whatever you set aside keeps costing you. You read it again, decide on it again and remember it again, so everything around the work gets done twice. Every item you open and set aside to handle later gets done twice. The work itself happens once, while the reading, the deciding and the remembering come around again. According to the source, if you stop doing your work twice, you can cut it in half. ## How work gets done twice The source describes it exactly. You pick up a piece of work, look it over, and set it aside for later. When later comes, you pick it up, read it once more, and only then do it. According to the source, that is how your traffic doubles on the spot. There is no moralizing in that description and no blame. There is **arithmetic**. From the moment you set the item aside, reading, deciding and remembering have each happened two times. The work itself was done once, and everything around it got doubled. Suppose an owner reads a message in the morning, decides to answer later and answers in the evening. By then he has read it three times. Or an installer who opens a quote, closes it and opens it again the next day. The quote takes five minutes and the reopening takes twenty. When he decides that a quote, once opened, gets closed, the same quotes take a third of the time. ## The later category The source states his rule as a personal declaration. One of the reasons he can handle so much traffic, he says, is that he does not do it twice. If he finds himself handling a piece of traffic, he handles it. He does not put it on hold or in a later category. That phrase is worth remembering. Most people believe they are running a to-do list. In practice they hold an **inventory of deferred decisions**, and every item in it charges a small fee each time your eye passes over it. The source adds a case everybody recognizes. When he rummages in his basket just to see what is there, he does what he finds there. He does it, with no tidying up, flagging or reviewing first. Suppose an owner who opens his inbox three times a day only to see what is there. Three scans, and nothing handled. Or a consultant with forty deferred items who reads through the list every morning and spends seven minutes a day on it. The day she closes twenty of them, even with imperfect decisions, the list gets half as long and her mornings take two minutes. ## Passing it on to avoid deciding The source also deals with the solution that looks easier: handing the item to somebody else. Anything you refer, it says, comes back for another reading, another round of digesting and another round of handling. Its summary of the whole argument: “Everything you don't handle comes back and bites.” It helps to separate two kinds of handoff. If a thing truly belongs to someone else, it goes to them, and that is correct. What the source describes is passing on as a way to avoid. The thing is yours, and you send it away so that you do not have to decide today. Suppose an owner asks his employee what he thinks about a decision that was the owner's to make. A week later it comes back to him exactly as it was. Or a business owner who sends a question to her accountant just to delay answering a client. The client waits four days for an answer she already knew. ## An argument from laziness Here the source surprises, with a move that has no parallel anywhere else in the material. Its reason for handling things at once is your comfort. According to the source, if you truly love ease, and what you want is to rest with your feet up on the desk, the way there is to handle everything when it comes and to refer nothing you can do quickly yourself. That people start to see you as a model of efficiency is incidental. The real reason, it says, is so that you can be lazy. It describes the opposite road without mercy. Putting off the action when the message arrives, and referring it all to somebody else, leads to a long, grinding labor, to tired muscles and tattered brains, and to baskets piled high. That answers why this is so hard. At the moment you put something off, it feels like rest. The source says it is the exact reverse, an investment in tomorrow's workload. It ends with an invitation: “So come loaf with me. Do it when you see it and do it yourself.” Suppose an owner who puts off an unpleasant phone call for three weeks. The call itself takes seven minutes, and the three weeks cost him far more. Or an owner who leaves invoicing to the end of the month and pays for it with a full day, where ten minutes a day would have done. When she starts closing each invoice on the day the work is delivered, month-end shrinks to half an hour. ## What the booklet has on this The chapter this article draws on includes two exercises: the inventory of deferrals, and one day. After them comes a self-check, and from there the booklet moves on to the cycle of action and to what makes a thing finished. If you have a list of things waiting for later, remember that you pay for it every day, including the days when you touch none of them. - [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/do-it-now-and-never-twice) · [Español](https://theonlyaxelj.com/es/study/articles/do-it-now-and-never-twice)