Haste is a signal: making decisions under pressure

When an important decision seems unable to wait even a day, it is usually because it has not yet been made: urgency takes the place of conviction and pushes you to close something you have not finished thinking through. That is why Lex Fati declines urgent requests. The first step is to separate a real deadline, which has a date, is set down in writing and is known to a professional, from inner pressure, which has no date and keeps renewing itself. What is genuinely urgent – a legal time limit, a signing, a medical question – belongs with your lawyer, accountant, notary or doctor; everything else can bear a few days’ distance, and those days say a great deal about the decision underneath.

In this article

1. Why is an urgent decision so often one that has not been made?
2. Three kinds of haste that feel the same
3. How can you tell a real deadline from inner pressure?
4. Real urgencies are already someone’s job
5. Why do we decline urgent cases?
6. What does a feeling of urgency often hide?
7. What can you do with a few days’ distance?
8. What if the deadline is real and the decision is still unclear?
9. A conversation without a clock
10. Frequently asked questions

Why is an urgent decision so often one that has not been made?

Someone who has truly made a decision rarely hurries to act on it. They may have a timetable and want to get on with it, but they do not need everything to happen this week to feel sure. Haste appears mainly when the decision is still moving inside, and the person fears that if they stop to look at it, it will change shape.

In that case speed does a very precise job: it keeps doubt out. If everything moves fast, there is no room for the awkward question, for the objection you would raise yourself if you were calm, for the conversation that ought to come first. Signing as soon as possible, replying today, getting the matter off the table before the weekend: these are ways of not hearing yourself. A decision that needs speed to stand up tends to give way the moment the speed goes, and then comes regret or, worse, the feeling that you never really decided at all.

The situations vary widely. A founder receives an offer for their company with only a few days to answer, and feels that thinking about it too long means never selling at all. A wealthy family wants the division of its assets signed before Christmas, so that nobody has to raise it at the family table over the festive season. A public figure wants to answer a newspaper article today. In all three the date seems to come from outside, and in all three it is worth asking how much of it is necessary and how much is relief.

Deciding quickly is not always a mistake. Some people decide fast and well, because they have been thinking in silence for a long time and speed is only the last stretch of a long road. The difference shows in what remains afterwards. Someone who had decided feels calm when signing; someone who was using haste to avoid deciding mainly feels that a weight has been lifted.

Three kinds of haste that feel the same

From the inside, every kind of haste feels alike: a tension that leaves room for nothing else, the need for it all to be over, the sense that every hour counts. Seen from a distance, though, at least three can be told apart, each calling for a different response.

The haste of the calendar

It is the only one that comes from the facts. A court or appeal deadline running out, an option that lapses on a date written into a contract, a tax filing, a shareholders’ meeting that has been called, a signing before a notary on a set day and hour. This haste is real, can be checked and has a professional who knows it better than you do. Taking it for personal unease is as much a mistake as taking personal unease for a deadline.

Borrowed haste

This is someone else’s calendar, which you have made your own. A buyer who wants to close before their financial year ends, a bank that needs an answer for its credit committee, a relative who would like everything signed before a trip. Such dates may be entirely legitimate, but they belong to whoever sets them, and it is worth knowing how far they actually bind you. Asking where the deadline comes from, and what happens if it moves by a week, is information in itself; if it carries legal or financial consequences, your lawyer or adviser will tell you what genuinely binds you.

Haste from within

It has no date. It is the wish for the discomfort to end, the weariness of carrying the same matter around for months, the fear of regretting not having acted and, sometimes, the need to show others or yourself that you are still in control. This kind of haste has one property that gives it away: it never runs out. Once the first target is met, another appears that seems just as pressing, because what drives it is not the matter but the state of the person carrying it.

The three can come together, and usually do. A real one-month deadline turns into a three-day emergency because the other side wants to move first and because, deep down, you want it over. Separating the three layers is the first piece of work, and you can do it alone.

How can you tell a real deadline from inner pressure?

The most useful test fits into one question: what exactly is lost if this decision waits ten days? Not what you feel, but what is lost. Write the answer down in one sentence, with a subject, a verb and a date. If you can, you are looking at a deadline. If the sentence comes out vague (“I’ll miss the opportunity”, “everything will get worse”, “I can’t go on like this”), what you are looking at is probably a state.

A real deadline usually meets four conditions at once:

• it has a specific date, not just a sense of something drawing near;
• it is written down somewhere: a contract, an official notice, a notice of meeting, an email setting out an explicit condition;
• someone competent can confirm it, usually your lawyer, accountant or notary;
• missing it has a consequence that can be described without adjectives.

Inner pressure fails almost all of them. It has no date, appears on no paper, nobody else can see it, and its consequence is described with words such as “unbearable” or “disaster”.

One borderline case deserves attention: the real deadline from which inner pressure has shaved off days. The meeting is a month away, but you feel you must have everything decided by tomorrow. The due date is real; the date you have set yourself is not. Ask your lawyer exactly what the deadline requires and by when: sometimes a single step is enough (filing a document, replying in writing, attending in person), and sometimes the deadline demands the whole decision. Knowing which applies to you brings the calendar back to its true size.

Real urgencies are already someone’s job

A medical question belongs to your doctor, and comes before anything else. A legal time limit belongs to your lawyer; a tax obligation to your tax adviser; a signing with a date to your notary and to whoever advises you on that transaction. A threat to your safety or to that of your family is a matter for the authorities, without delay. In none of these cases should we be the first to act, and if you write to us with one of them, we will say so in the first conversation.

It is the order we always insist on; with urgent matters it becomes clearer still. The professional who knows the deadline also knows the room within it: what can be brought forward, what can wait, what each option costs. That knowledge is theirs, and it is what you need this week. We explain in more detail where the lawyer’s work ends, and why ours only begins after theirs.

In practice, if your matter has a real deadline that falls soon, the conversation you need now is with that professional. Once you have had it and the deadline is in good hands, what remains is the decision you must take within that framework, or the weight of taking it. That can wait a few days and be thought through calmly.

Why do we decline urgent cases?

Of all the reasons we say no to a request, haste is among the most frequent and the least understood. Someone who writes in a hurry expects urgency to open the door, and finds it closes it instead, at least for a while. There are three reasons.

The first is a matter of method. Our work requires a person to listen, to themselves as well, and in the middle of a rush that does not happen: they are waiting for an answer, any answer, that lets them act at once. Taking on a case in that state would mean working with someone who is not fully present, and whatever was decided in those conditions would still bear the mark of haste.

The second is a matter of honesty. Urgency is the moment when it is easiest to sell someone something: the more pressed a person feels, the fewer questions they ask, the less they compare and the more they are willing to pay. Some people make a living from it, and our note on how to recognise serious work in this field sets out how to spot it in any practice. Our rule runs the other way: haste is a reason to wait, not to begin. Nor is there any surcharge for urgency; the fee is agreed before anything starts and does not depend on how pressed anyone is. We explain separately how the work is invoiced.

The third is respect for the decision. If a decision has not been made, the last thing it needs is someone from outside supplying one more reason to rush it. Saying no at that moment also says something else: that your decision deserves more time than you are currently giving it.

A no because of haste concerns the timing, not the person. We say it in the same conversation, with the reason, and nothing prevents you from presenting your situation again once the deadline has passed, your professionals have acted, or the urgency has simply made room for the underlying question.

What does a feeling of urgency often hide?

Inner haste rarely comes from nowhere. It serves a purpose, and recognising it changes how you see the decision. Four purposes come up often, frequently together.

The first is the wish to let circumstances decide. If the deadline forces the issue, no one can say you chose; there simply was no time. It is a very human way of shielding yourself from the weight of a choice you do not want to sign with your own name, such as selling the company your father founded or dividing an estate between children who barely speak to one another.

The second is a conversation still to be had. Behind many urgencies lies a conversation being avoided: with a business partner, a son or daughter, a spouse, or with yourself. Deciding quickly lets you present the matter as a done deal and spares you the moment of talking it through. The conversation does not go away, though; it only changes subject, and tends to arrive later, and heavier.

The third is weariness. Someone who has carried a matter in silence for months reaches a point where any way out seems better than carrying it further. At that point the ending matters more than the quality of the decision, and it shows in what gets signed. Weariness is legitimate and deserves respect; it should simply not be the one deciding.

The fourth is habit. Some people always decide this way: at the last minute, under pressure, convinced that urgency gives them clarity. Sometimes it has served them well for years, in settings where speed was an advantage. But if you look back and see that your hardest decisions, the ones you later regretted, all share the same hurried shape, haste is no longer a circumstance; it has become a pattern. Our note When a pattern repeats explains how to look at such decisions as a series rather than one by one.

What can you do with a few days’ distance?

Taking a few days is not putting things off. Putting off has no end date and, while it lasts, the situation goes on deciding itself; a few days’ distance has a beginning, an end and a purpose. The difference is practical, and best set down in writing before you start.

1. Set an end date. Choose a specific day, within whatever margin a real deadline allows, and write it down. Without that date, distance turns into evasion.
2. Write the decision down in a single sentence. Not the problem, the decision: “sell my stake or not”, “sign the proposed division or not”. If it will not fit into one sentence, it is not yet clear what has to be decided, and that is the first thing these days can clarify.
3. During that time, sign nothing, announce nothing and send nothing you wrote at night: no letter of resignation, no statement to the press, no message to the family. If something cannot wait, it belongs to your professional, and you will know because it has a date.
4. Watch what the urgency does. Each day, note in one line how hard it presses and what stirs it up. If it drops when no one is pushing, it was borrowed; if it shifts with your thoughts rather than with events, it was yours; if it stays the same and keeps its shape, what is pushing may be a decision that is beginning to form.
5. Ask yourself the underlying questions: what you really want, what you fear losing, what you will think of this decision in five years’ time. Our three questions before deciding are a simple way to put it in order, alone, with a sheet of paper.

What happens in those days varies from person to person. Sometimes the urgency falls apart within a couple of days and shows that the decision was smaller than it seemed. Sometimes it turns into something else – sadness, anger or relief – which says more about the matter than the haste did. And sometimes the decision appears whole and quiet, and then it can be taken without hurry and without fear that it will shift tomorrow.

What if the deadline is real and the decision is still unclear?

This is the hardest situation, and there is no point pretending it is simple. There is a deadline with a date, your professionals have confirmed it, and you still do not know what you want. Ten days’ distance is out of the question here, but distance of another kind is not.

First, ask your lawyer or adviser to tell you precisely what has to be decided before that date and what can be left until later. Second, within what must be decided now, separate the technical from the personal. Your advisers prepare the technical part; the personal part is yours, and it deserves at least a night’s reflection and a conversation with someone you trust who has no stake in the outcome.

There is a third thing, less obvious. When a decision is taken under a deadline you did not choose, it helps to note down why you are taking it and what you could not think through fully, to come back to it once the deadline has passed. Some decisions taken in a hurry can be reviewed or adjusted later, with time and with your advisers, and others cannot; which is which is a question for your lawyer from the outset.

Once the deadline has passed, whatever remains open is no longer urgent: doubt about what was decided, the weight of having decided it that way, the question of why it always ends the same way. That is precisely when a private conversation can make sense.

A conversation without a clock

If, once the deadline has passed or your professionals have done their part, a decision is still open, or the one you took weighs on you, you can present your situation to us. The first step is a conversation on WhatsApp or by telephone with one of the two of us; in English, that is Tony Alcalá. You tell us what you wish, in whatever order suits you, and we listen.

Our first question is usually “how long has this been going on?” When someone writes to us in a hurry, we ask it of the haste itself: not how long the matter has existed, which often goes back a long way, but on what day it began to press, and what happened that day. A phone call, an offer, a conversation, a date that suddenly appeared in the diary. The answer says a great deal about what kind of haste it is.

Then we assess whether we can contribute anything and tell you plainly, with the reason if the answer is no. If it is yes, what we will do, for how long and for what agreed fee is settled before anything begins. You can take as many days as you need to reply. We describe step by step what happens before we accept a case.

Frequently asked questions

Why shouldn’t you make important decisions in a hurry?

Because haste tends to take the place of the decision rather than accompany it: it drowns out doubt and closes something that has not yet been thought through. A decision made that way tends to give way once the pressure lifts, leaving the feeling that circumstances made it. Deciding quickly is not wrong in itself; deciding quickly in order not to have to decide is.

How can you tell if something is really urgent?

Ask yourself what exactly is lost if the decision waits ten days, and write the answer down with a date. A genuine deadline has a specific date, appears in a document, can be confirmed by a professional and has a consequence you can describe without adjectives. If the answer is vague, or comes down to “I can’t take any more”, the urgency lies in your state rather than in the matter. If in doubt, check the deadline with your lawyer before doing anything else.

How long should you wait before making a big decision?

Long enough to see how the urgency changes, with an end date set in advance; there is no figure that suits everyone. For many personal decisions a few days are enough. Where there is a legal or financial deadline, that deadline sets the margin, and your lawyer or adviser will tell you what it is. What matters is that the waiting has an end: without a date, reflection turns into putting things off.

What should you do if you are pressured to sign quickly?

Have your lawyer read the document before you sign, and ask them exactly what happens if you sign a week later. Ask, too, for the deadline in writing, and ask where it comes from; whatever the answer, it is information for your lawyer. Until then, sign nothing your lawyer has not read, however urgent it is made to seem, and do not announce your decision before you have made it.

Do you take on urgent cases?

No: we decline urgent requests, and we say so in the first conversation, with the reason. If there is a legal time limit, a signing or a medical question, your lawyer, adviser, notary or doctor must act first. Nobody can work calmly in the middle of a rush, and urgency is the worst moment to commission anything. Once the deadline has passed, or your professionals have acted and something remains open, you can present your situation at no cost and with no obligation.

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