Many of us have been brought up to believe that we should never put off to tomorrow a decision that we can make today.

But author and professor Steven Sample writes in his book The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership that “This bit of conventional wisdom may be good counsel for managers and bureaucrats, but it’s terrible advice for leaders.”

Instead, he suggests that to be a more effective leader you should follow the below 2 rules:

Sample offers a few reasons why:

Sample argues that you should reserve for yourself only those decisions that relate to the following issues:

As Sample points out, the timing of a decision could be just as important as the decision itself.

When you’re faced with an important decision, ask yourself: How long do I have?

In some cases, it’s helpful to use “artful procrastination”: postponing a decision can allow for potentially favorable, but unexpected, opportunities to open up.

But there can be a downside to putting off such decisions: “Sometimes no decision by Tuesday is in fact a decision by default.”

As author and entrepreneur Peter Diamandis writes in his book Bold, we’re taught that when we’re given a choice we have to choose only one option.

In Diamandis’ own experience, throughout graduate school people told him he would either have to go to school or start a company.

Instead, he did both: he started 3 companies while in school, and 8 more before he was 40 years old.

Diamandis gives the below examples of other entrepreneurs who also rejected such binary choices:

Authors and entrepreneurs Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson write in their book Rework that big decisions are both hard to make and hard to change. 

Once you’ve made a big decision, and your ego and pride are involved, you have a tendency to believe you made the right decision – even if you didn’t.

Instead, they recommend making tiny decisions: choices “small enough that they’re effectively temporary.”

With tiny decisions, there’s a smaller penalty if you mess up: it’s cheaper, in time and other resources, to fix a small mistake than a big one.

Fried and Heinemeier Hansson cite polar explorer Ben Saunders’ reflections on his solo North Pole expedition, the equivalent of 31 back-to-back marathons spanning 72 days.

Because the thought of making any huge decisions during the journey was so overwhelming, Saunders used a more manageable approach: “getting to that bit of ice a few yards in front of me.”

Note: We wrote about a related topic, Peter Sims’ idea of “little bets,” in a previous issue.

“In any situation in life, you only have three options. You always have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you would leave it but not leaving it, and not accepting it. It’s that struggle, that aversion, that is responsible for most of our misery.”

- Entrepreneur Naval Ravikant in an interview with Tim Ferriss, captured in the book Tools of Titans