How Delaying Decisions Can Increase Your Productivity and Make Your Online Course Launch a Success

Why do some course creators and coaches struggle, even though they are taking consistent action? It’s because they might not be taking the RIGHT ACTIONS at the right time.

Delaying decisions, to increase productivity? When you first hear this it might sound counterintuitive. Purposely delaying decision making seems much more like indecisive laziness or lack of action than a productivity hack. We certainly aren’t suggesting laziness, so give us a moment to have you consider how delaying decisions can actually help you move forward in your online course business easier.

Deferring a decision until you reach the best time to make it can help you move forward with your business in the best direction possible. This idea sprouted from the realm of software development, and more specifically from a well known software engineer, Bob Martin:

The purpose of a good [software] architecture is to defer decisions, delay decisions. The job of an architect is not to make decisions, the job of an architect is to build a structure that allows decisions to be delayed as long as possible. Why? Because when you delay a decision, you have more information when it comes time to make it.

Bob Martin

The project paradox: making the biggest decisions when knowledge is at its absolute lowest. pic.twitter.com/b7zBa4Aq7m

— Tobias Fors (@tofo) September 18, 2014

How Can This Practice of Delaying Decisions Be Applied to Your Online Course to Help You Move Forward Effectively?

When you first launch your course, you may not know all of the questions you will need to answer in order to help your students move forward. At Heights, believe that often, an online course or coaching program should not be a static, set in stone collection of content, but should instead evolve and improve as more students go through it.

It is normal to not have all the answers when you launch your online course, whether you are a first time course creator, or a veteran.

Instead of trying to come up with answers for the perfect online course before you enroll your first student, focus on making progress and leaving certain difficult to make decisions on the sidelines until you have the leads and the students to help you validate your ideas. This will make those tough decisions so much easier to make.

Getting held up on decisions that you can’t actually accurately make yet is poison for a business, especially solo entrepreneurs.

At Heights, we come from a background of interaction design, and we’ve learned that know matter how much we think we know about our potential customers, once they start experiencing our products they will tell us things we would have never thought of.

Getting feedback early and often is important. Don’t let decisions that will seem small in the long run hold you back from launching your new online course or coaching program.

Avoid decision paralysis by remembering that once you gain more feedback from your students that decision will be much easier to make.

Taking Action is Necessary for Results, but Taking the Correct Action Multiplies the Speed at Which You Reach Them

A pro football player isn’t better because they are running around the field more than an amateur, they are better because they run to the right spot at the right time.

We hear often coaches saying, “Take action. Take action!”. This is necessary of course, but taking the right action at the right time is even more important. Building and promoting an online course can seem like a daunting project, and the deeper you get into it, the more things you realize you could do, or believe you should do. Spending energy on the wrong things at the wrong time can delay valuable feedback you could be receiving from prospective customers and early students, as well as delay revenue coming in. Getting stuck in the wrong actions for too long can delay a course creator’s time to launch so far that they decide to give up. (For more, see what we’ve written on how taking consistent action every day will help grow your online course business)

Now you could spend time learning along the way, and being careful to take action on only what you need to decide at each specific step of progress. If you don’t have the knowledge of what to do next, that route can be a slow one. Here at Heights we want to empower course creators to launch better online courses and learning programs faster and with better results.

We’ve created a free 30 day online course creation checklist that can help you map out what you should be doing and when so that you don’t need to worry about deferring decisions or prioritizing tasks in the wrong order.

Next time you come to a crossroads with your plans, think to yourself if this is a decision that can be delayed until you gain more information, and if delaying it will allow you can move onto other parts of your online course business.

Do you want to create and launch your online course in the next 30 days?