One of the most expensive things you can allow in a business is people starting work before anyone has clearly established why it needs to be done.

I recently watched 32 hours of work go straight into the garbage because the people responsible for a project hadn’t properly thought through what they wanted, why they wanted it, or what they were going to do with it.

That’s four full working days.

Now multiply that across an entire company. The meetings, revisions, abandoned projects, and completed work that nobody ever uses.

It’s infuriating how much time and money gets wasted because someone couldn’t be bothered to think through what they were asking for before involving everyone else.

Having an idea is easy. Making sure it’s worth other people’s time is a responsibility.

Before anyone commits time, money, or resources to a project, the person proposing it should be able to answer three questions.

1. What measurable result will this project produce?

What are we trying to improve, by how much, and how will we measure whether it worked?

If you can’t define what success looks like, you have no business asking people to start working toward it.

2. When does this actually need to be done, and what’s at stake if it isn’t?

There’s a difference between a deadline that protects an important business outcome and a deadline someone invented because they’d prefer to have something by Friday.

I want to know which one we’re dealing with.

3. Who is responsible for putting this work to use, and what happens after it’s delivered?

Who’s going to use it, what are they going to do with it, and what decision or action will it enable?

Because completing a project isn’t the same thing as producing something valuable.

If someone can’t answer these questions, they haven’t thought through the project well enough to justify committing other people’s time and resources to it.

And urgency doesn’t excuse that.

Someone else’s last-minute request can feel like an obligation simply because they’re treating it like an emergency.

But their urgency doesn’t automatically make something important, and it certainly doesn’t mean it deserves to become your top priority.

If you value doing good work and actually enjoying what you do, you need to become more discerning about what you agree to take on.

These three questions will save you wasted effort, unnecessary frustration, and a considerable amount of resentment toward the people you work with.

You can be incredibly helpful without being endlessly available for poorly thought-out requests.

Make people responsible for knowing what they want, why they want it, and what they’re going to do with it.

Their failure to think something through shouldn’t become everyone else’s responsibility to execute.