Four decisions get made every time you use one of these tools.
You are currently making all four by accident.
They get made in the half-second between reading a task and starting to type, and because they happen below the level of noticing, they get made the same way every time regardless of what is in front of you. A two-minute job and a decision that affects forty people receive identical treatment, because you never decided they were different.
This chapter is about moving those four decisions above the waterline. It takes about twenty seconds once you know what they're, and it's the highest-leverage twenty seconds in this book, because everything downstream inherits them.
What do I actually need?
Not what the task says. What you need from it.
Somebody sends you a supplier's proposal and asks what you think. That isn't a request for analysis of the proposal. Depending on the week it might be tell me whether to worry, or give me something I can forward, or find the thing I've missed, or decide this for me so I don't have to.
Four different jobs. One sentence of input. And if you don't separate what you need from the material you're looking at, you'll produce a careful analysis of the material and answer none of the four.
The habit is small: before you type anything, finish this sentence. What I actually need out of this is...
Most people cannot finish it on the first try. That is the finding, and it is worth sitting with, because the thing you can't articulate to yourself is not going to arrive by accident.
How complex is this really?
Three questions settle it, and none is about difficulty.
How many people does the outcome touch. How many things do I not know yet. And if this is wrong, how easily is it undone.
A hard task affecting nobody, with a known answer, that can be redone in ten minutes, is a simple task that happens to be tedious. An easy task touching forty people that can't be walked back is a complex one.
You have met this idea already, in the chapter about which work survives. The order is set by consequence, not by difficulty, and the same sort applies here at the level of a single afternoon.
How deep should I go?
Here is where the money leaks, and it leaks in both directions.
Everybody understands the first failure: too shallow. You accept a thin answer on something that mattered.
Almost nobody guards against the second: too deep. Fifteen minutes of checking, three passes and a scoring pass on something that needed one sentence and forty seconds; that is not diligence. That is the previous chapters applied without judgement, and it will exhaust you inside a fortnight, at which point you'll abandon the whole method and conclude it doesn't work.
The depth is a decision, and it is yours, and it is made before you see anything.
Roughly: a single pass for the reversible and low-consequence. A second, different question for anything going to another person. The full treatment — attack it, score it, use two, show it differently. Only for the things where being wrong costs something you can't get back.
That isn't a rule you apply mechanically. It is a judgement you make consciously, which is the entire difference from what you're doing now.
What shape should the answer arrive in?
You are getting prose because prose is the default, not because you chose it.
Decide first. A table if you are comparing. A ranked list if you are choosing. Five bullets and a recommendation if somebody has ninety seconds. A short spoken summary if it's going to be listened to rather than read. A single number with the reasoning underneath if it's going into a decision.
Deciding the shape before you ask does something odd and useful. It forces you to work out what the answer is for, and about a third of the time you'll discover the question was wrong. The shape is a test of the question, applied before you spend anything.
All four collapse into a sentence you can write in fifteen seconds and reuse forever.
I need [what I actually need], this is [simple / significant / consequential] because [who it touches and whether it is reversible], so I will [depth], and I want it as [shape].
Filled in, on an ordinary Tuesday:
I need to know whether to escalate this complaint, it is significant because it touches one customer but sets a precedent, so I will ask once and then ask a different question, and I want it as three bullets and a recommendation.
Fifteen seconds. And notice what has happened: you now have the six-line brief from the previous chapter pointed at something, rather than fired into the middle distance.
I said the shape is a test of the question and that about a third of the time it fails the question. Here is what that failure looks like from the inside, because it is the most useful thing in this chapter and it takes about a minute.
A contract is up for renewal in five weeks. Facilities, cleaning, three sites, and it has rolled over twice without anybody looking at it properly. The obvious thing to type is the thing almost everybody types.
Should we renew this cleaning contract?
Now do the four sentences first, and watch what happens when you get to the fourth.
What I actually need out of this is... a recommendation I can take to the operations director. Fine. That is answerable.
This is significant because... it touches three sites and about forty people's working conditions, it commits money for two years, and getting out of it early costs a penalty. Reversible, but not cheaply.
So I'll go this deep... second pass, different question, because it is going to another person and it commits real money.
And I want it as... a table.
Stop there. A table with what in the columns?
You wanted to compare. You cannot compare one thing. The moment you tried to name the shape you discovered that you do not know what the alternatives are, and you were about ten seconds away from asking a question that could only ever have come back yes, on balance, with some caveats · which is the answer to a question nobody needed answered.
The question was never should we renew. It is:
Here is the current contract and what we actually pay. What are the three realistic alternatives, including renegotiating this one? Put them in a table: cost over two years, what changes for the sites, what the exit terms are, and what I would be giving up. Then tell me which you would take and what would have to be true for the answer to be a different one.
Same five weeks. Same contract. Same twenty seconds of thinking, spent before you typed rather than after you read.
Look at what the shape did. It didn't improve the question. It revealed that the question was a yes-or-no dressed up as an analysis, and it did that by asking a purely mechanical thing · what goes in the columns · which has no opinion in it at all and cannot be argued with.
That is why the fourth decision goes last and matters most. The first three are about you and how much you care. The fourth one is about the answer, and it is the only one of the four that can tell you that you were about to waste the other three.
And when the shape survives, that is information too. Sometimes you get to and I want it as and the answer is genuinely three bullets and a recommendation, and nothing changes. Good. You have spent four seconds confirming the question was sound, which is not a wasted four seconds · it is the same trade as chapter six's six minutes, arriving earlier and costing less.
The brief tells it how to work. This tells you how much of your own attention to spend. Those are different decisions and almost everybody conflates them.
There is a version of this you already trust completely.
A doctor doesn't treat every patient identically. They assess what is presenting, classify how serious it's, decide how far to investigate, and choose how to deliver the result. Four decisions, made in about a minute, before anything else happens.
They also don't run the full battery on everybody. Not because they don't care. Because running everything on everybody means running nothing well, and a clinic that investigated every sore throat to the same depth as a chest pain would fail both patients.
The triage is the skill. The treatment is the easy part once the triage is right.
You have been walking into every consultation and ordering the same tests.
I want to be specific about the too-deep failure, because it's the one people who read books like this actually make.
You will finish this book enthusiastic. For about three weeks you'll check everything, score everything, run everything twice. Your output will genuinely improve and your throughput will collapse.
Then a bad week arrives, and you won't have time for any of it, and you'll drop the whole thing rather than drop the parts that were never needed. That is the failure mode. Not laziness. Uniform effort applied until it broke.
I can describe that arc closely because it is the most predictable thing in this book, and because knowing the shape of it in advance is most of the defence.
Week one is wonderful. You run the full treatment on everything. The six-line brief, a second question, a scoring pass, a second system on anything that matters. Your output genuinely improves and you can feel it. You tell somebody about it at lunch. This is the week people write the enthusiastic message to a colleague saying they have finally worked out what this is for.
Week two is where it starts costing. You are still doing all of it, and now you notice that a two-line reply to a supplier took eleven minutes because you scored it. You do it anyway, because dropping a step feels like admitting the method does not work, and you have just told somebody at lunch that it does.
That is the sentence to watch for in your own head. If I skip this, was I wrong about the whole thing? No. You were wrong about one task's depth, and those are entirely different mistakes, and conflating them is what does the damage.
Week three is the bad week. Something goes wrong at work, unrelated to any of this. Two people are off, a deadline moves, and you have forty things to do by Thursday.
And here is what actually happens, because it is not a decision you make. You just stop. Not deliberately, not with a moment where you weigh it up. The method requires attention and there is none, so it goes, entirely, in an afternoon. Every step, including the ones that took four seconds.
Then the story you tell yourself afterwards is the expensive part, and it is always the same one: it works when I have time.
That sentence is a way of describing something that no longer happens. Anything that only survives good weeks is not a method. It is a mood you had in March.
Same three weeks, one difference, and the difference is upstream of all of it.
You decided the depth per task from the first day, so week one never contained the eleven-minute supplier reply. The full treatment ran maybe twice that week, on things that deserved it, and everything else got four seconds and a shape.
Which means that when week three arrives and there is no attention available, there is nothing to abandon. The four-second version costs four seconds. It survives a bad Thursday because it was never expensive enough to be worth dropping, and the fifteen-minute version does not need to survive, because you were not running it on everything to begin with.
That is the entire argument for the twenty seconds at the top of this chapter. It is not about doing better work on any single task. It is about building a version of this you will still be doing in November, and the only way anybody has ever managed that is by spending almost nothing on almost everything.
The defence is deciding the depth up front, per task, on purpose. It gives you a reason to spend four seconds on something, rather than feeling as though you cheated.
Four seconds is the correct amount of attention for most of what crosses your desk, and knowing that's what makes the fifteen minutes affordable when the thing in front of you deserves it.
One more reason to decide first rather than adjust later, and it's mechanical.
We had a system that fired off a batch of work all at once, as fast as it could, and promptly ran into limits it couldn't have known about until it hit them. The fix was to cap how much could be running at any moment.
The interesting part is where the cap had to go. It had to sit before each piece of work started, not after, and the comment written into the code at the time explains why in six words:
a promise that's already executing cannot be un-started.
That is true of your attention as well. Once you've read three pages of an answer you didn't need, you cannot get the reading back. Once you have sent a shallow answer on something consequential, the shallowness has already arrived at the other end.
Every one of the four decisions is cheap before and expensive after; that is the whole argument for making them on purpose.
I have described a way of deciding scope before starting, and I have one full record of it working.
One.
We built a planner that works out the shape of a job before running any of it. What depends on what, what can run at the same time, where a gate has to sit. There is a ledger where every run is supposed to be recorded with what it predicted and what it actually achieved. One entry in it shows a job predicted at 0.75 and delivered at 0.928, nine steps, none failed, about five minutes end to end.
That is a good result. It is also a single data point, and a single data point is a story, not evidence.
So I can give you the reasoning for deciding scope up front, and I can show you one run where it went well, and I am not going to tell you it reliably beats not doing it, because one run does not support that sentence and you would be right to push back on it.
Take it as a practice with a good argument and a thin scoreboard, and hold it to exactly that.
The next task that arrives, before you type anything, finish four sentences.
What I actually need out of this is... This is complex or simple because... So I'll go this deep... And I want it as...
You will get one of them wrong. Usually the first, and usually you'll find that what you needed was not what you were about to ask for.
That discovery, on its own, is worth more than the twenty seconds, and it's available to you on every single piece of work for the rest of your career.
But there's something the four questions cannot tell you, and it's the thing that decides whether any of this lands. They tell you what you need and how much to spend.
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### ▪ DO THIS > > Four sentences before you type anything. Twenty seconds. > > 1 · What I actually need out of this is… Finish it. Most people can't on the first try, and that's the finding. > > 2 · This is simple / significant / consequential because… Who it touches, what you don't know, how easily it's undone. Not how hard it is. > > 3 · So I'll go this deep… One pass for the reversible. A second, different question for anything going to another person. The full treatment only where being wrong costs something you can't get back. > > 4 · And I want it as… A table if comparing. A ranked list if choosing. Five bullets and a recommendation if they've ninety seconds. > > Twenty seconds. > > When four seconds is the right answer: give it four seconds. That's the point of deciding. Uniform effort applied to everything is what makes people abandon the method inside a fortnight. > > You'll know it worked when step 4 changes step 1. Because working out what shape the answer needs frequently reveals you were about to ask the wrong question.
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They tell you nothing about the person who is going to read it.