The Cost of "We'll Get to It Later"

There is a quiet sentence that kills more startups than failure ever does: "We will get to it later." It sounds reasonable. Sensible, even. You are busy. You have a backlog. You have "higher priorities." You tell yourself you'll circle back when the dust settles. But later isn't a placeholder. It's a high-interest loan. And the interest compounds daily.

The Hidden Price of Delay

I've sat in enough planning meetings to know how it goes. Someone says, "We should automate that," or "We should fix that process," and everyone nods. Then it goes on a list. The list gets longer. The thing that was urgent in the room becomes optional by the time you open your laptop the next morning.

Every idea has a half-life. Not because the market changes (though it does), but because your conviction decays. When you delay, you aren't just pausing; you are leaking.

Momentum evaporates. You know that feeling when you're in the zone? When you stay up an extra hour because the solution is right there? That energy doesn't transfer to "next quarter." By the time you "get to it," you're starting cold. The spark that fuelled late-night breakthroughs has dimmed. You spend the first hour just remembering what you were thinking.

Confidence softens. What felt certain on Monday ("This is the fix we need") becomes a "what-if" by Friday. Maybe the market has moved. Maybe someone else is already doing it. Maybe it wasn't that important after all. You start to rationalise the delay instead of challenging it.

The idea becomes abstract. It moves from a project to a daydream. Something you "might do one day" instead of something you do this week. And daydreams don't get shipped.

The "close enough" factor. Here's the one that stings: someone else, with half your talent but twice your speed, ships a version that is "close enough." They didn't wait for the perfect moment. They didn't wait for the right hire or the right tool. They started. Now they own the space, and you own a note in a doc somewhere.

What felt like a revolution on Monday becomes a "nice to have" by Friday. Eventually, it just becomes a ghost, something you vaguely remember "thinking about once." The cost of "later" isn't just time. It's the slow death of possibility.

Ideas are Cheap. Execution is Rare.

In the startup world, we fetishize the "Aha!" moment. The shower thought. The whiteboard session. The "what if we just…" that gets everyone excited. I love those moments too. But ideas do not create outcomes. Actions do.

You do not get paid for knowing what should be automated. You do not get market share for spotting an inefficiency in a meeting. You don't get a "win" for talking about plans over coffee. You get paid for what runs in the background while you sleep: the system you built, the process you fixed, the thing that actually exists in the world.

I've met founders who could describe their ideal product in perfect detail but had never shipped a single feature. I've also met people who shipped something rough, got torn apart by users, and then iterated until it worked. Guess which group had a business? I can't remember who said it, but it stuck with me:

"Success comes not from great ideas, but from the courage to start and the resilience to keep going."

Ideas are a commodity. They are everywhere. Everyone has a list of things they "should" do. The courage to start (to make the first version, to fix the first process, to have the first awkward conversation with a customer) is the only true scarcity. That's what separates the people who build from the people who plan.

The Automation Debt (The Math of Later)

Let's make this uncomfortable with some cold arithmetic. Pick something you do every week: something manual, repetitive, and vaguely annoying. Maybe it's copying data between spreadsheets. Chasing invoice reminders. Sending the same onboarding email to every new client. Updating the same report by hand every Monday. You've said "we should automate that" at least once. You haven't yet.

Now imagine that process costs you:

If your time is worth £50 per hour (and for a founder or key operator, it's often worth more), you are burning £6,000 every year. Not on strategy. Not on growth. On a task that could have been automated in a weekend.

But the real cost is worse. You aren't just losing money; you are losing the opportunity to reinvest those hours. Every week you delay is a week those 2.5 hours don't go into sales, product, or rest. The debt isn't only financial. It's cognitive. You carry the "I really should fix that" in the back of your mind, and that nagging has a cost too.

The Compound Effect of Action

Now flip it. Imagine you spend one weekend automating that process. Not perfectly. Just enough that it runs without you.

Year 1: You reclaim 120 hours. That's three full working weeks.

The pivot: You use those 120 hours to find one new enterprise client. Or build one new feature. Or finally write that content strategy. Or train that hire. The hours don't vanish; they get reinvested.

The result: That new client pays. That new feature attracts users. That content brings leads. That hire scales you. Now you have revenue, or data, or capacity that you didn't have before. And that creates the next round of options.

By delaying for a year, you didn't just lose 120 hours. You lost the entire growth trajectory those hours would have fuelled. The "later" approach doesn't keep you still. It keeps you behind.

The Startup "Momentum" Problem

The hardest part of a startup isn't the "Big Launch." It's finding the first source of momentum. The first customer who says yes. The first data point that proves you aren't crazy. Once you have one, you can get two. Then ten. But zero is a trap.

Delaying is dangerous because it denies you feedback. If you wait until the product is "ready," you don't learn what's wrong with it until it's too expensive to change. If you wait until the process is "perfect," you never learn which parts actually matter. The earlier you start, the earlier the market tells you you're wrong. And in a startup, being told you're wrong early is the only way to eventually be right.

I've seen founders wait for the right moment to reach out to customers and run out of runway before they had a single conversation. I've seen teams polish an internal tool for months while the real bottleneck was something they could have fixed in a day. Startups don't usually die because the idea was "bad." They die because they ran out of time before they started executing. They stayed in the "thinking" phase until the bank account or the passion hit zero.

Momentum doesn't wait for perfect. It starts with one step. One email. One automation. One "good enough" version. The rest compounds from there.

Starting Today is an Unfair Advantage

We massively overestimate what we can do in a month, but we fundamentally underestimate what we can do in a year of consistent, automated action. A month feels like a sprint; a year feels like a vague promise. But the people who win are the ones who start now and keep going.

Starting today means your learning curve begins now. You find out what breaks. You find out what users actually want. You find out which process was worth automating and which one wasn't. That information only exists on the other side of action.

It means your systems improve while you focus on the big picture. One automation this month. Another next month. In a year, you're not the same person with the same to-do list; you're someone with a stack of systems that run without you.

It means your future self inherits a machine, not a backlog. A machine that generates leads, onboard clients, or keeps the numbers in sync. Not a list of "we should really…" that never gets shorter.

Delaying feels safe because it avoids the risk of a "bad start." But in reality, you are just paying a premium for indecision. The cost shows up in lost hours, lost momentum, and lost belief that you'll ever "get to it."

Later is not free. Later is the most expensive way to run a business. So pick one thing (one process, one conversation, one small fix) and do it this week. Not next quarter. Not when things calm down. This week. The rest will follow.