Every system tells you what to do. This one tells you what not to.
Founders are drowning in to-do lists, priority matrices, and productivity frameworks that all answer the same question: what should you do next? Almost none of them answer the more valuable question: what should you deliberately not do today? That is what the AVOID TODAY framework addresses.
The most productive thing a founder can do is not do something.
Think about your last week. How many hours did you spend on activities that, in retrospect, could have waited? A meeting that could have been an email next week. A vendor evaluation you started before the requirements were clear. A competitive response to a move that turned out to be irrelevant. A hiring decision initiated before the role was properly scoped.
Most founders, when they are honest, estimate that 20-30% of their weekly activity is premature, reactive, or unnecessary. Not wrong, exactly - these are often legitimate tasks. But they are tasks done at the wrong time, in the wrong sequence, or before the information needed to do them well was available.
This is not a discipline problem. It is a systems problem. Every tool in a founder's stack is designed to add items to the queue: email brings requests, Slack brings questions, news brings competitive signals, advisors bring suggestions. Nothing in the stack is designed to remove items from the queue - to actively say “this does not belong in your day today.”
The AVOID TODAY framework fills that gap.
Inversion, and the art of saying no to almost everything.
The AVOID TODAY framework draws on two powerful ideas from investors who built their careers on what they did not do.
Charlie Munger's inversion. Munger's most famous mental model is deceptively simple: instead of asking “how do I succeed?” ask “what would guarantee failure, and how do I avoid that?” Invert the problem. For founders, this means instead of asking “what should I do today?” ask “what would be a waste of my time today, and how do I make sure I don't do it?”
The answers are often surprising. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is not start a project that seems urgent but is not yet ready. Not respond to a competitive move that feels threatening but is strategically irrelevant. Not take a meeting that would consume an hour to accomplish what an email could do in five minutes next week.
Warren Buffett's art of saying no. Buffett has said that the difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything. This is not about being difficult. It is about recognizing that your time and attention are finite resources, and every yes is an implicit no to something else.
For a startup founder, this principle is even more critical than for an investor. Buffett is choosing between investments. A founder is choosing between actions that consume not just capital but personal energy, team attention, and organizational momentum. A bad “yes” does not just waste money - it fragments focus across the entire company.
The AVOID TODAY framework in practice.
AVOID TODAY is not an acronym. It is a literal instruction that appears in DESTA's daily operating brief alongside the DO, DELEGATE, and WATCH categories. While those categories tell you what deserves your attention, AVOID TODAY tells you what does not - today.
The distinction between “avoid” and “ignore” is important. AVOID TODAY does not mean the item is unimportant. It means the timing is wrong. The context is not yet right. The information needed to act well is not yet available. Or acting now would be reactive rather than strategic.
Here is how to apply it to your own decision-making, with or without DESTA:
Ask: Is this the right time, or just an available time?
Many tasks get done not because the timing is right but because the founder has a gap in their schedule. Starting a vendor evaluation during a slow Tuesday afternoon feels productive. But if the requirements for that vendor are still being defined by a product decision you have not made yet, you are doing the evaluation twice - once now with incomplete information, and once later when you actually know what you need. AVOID TODAY says: the task is real, but doing it now creates rework.
Ask: Am I responding or reacting?
When a competitor makes a move - a feature launch, a pricing change, a partnership announcement - the instinct is to respond immediately. Call a meeting. Start analyzing. Begin planning a counter-move. But most competitive moves do not require an immediate response. The competitor's Salesforce integration does not change your Q2 priorities unless it directly threatens a deal you are about to close. AVOID TODAY says: acknowledge the signal, track its development, and respond when you have enough information to respond well.
Ask: Is the landscape stable enough to act?
Sometimes the right response to a changing environment is to wait for it to settle. If your industry is in the middle of a regulatory shift, starting a major compliance initiative before the final rules are published means building to a moving target. If the market is consolidating through acquisitions, hiring for a role that the acquisition might redefine is premature. AVOID TODAY says: the action is needed, but the ground is still moving.
Ask: Would I do this if I weren't feeling pressure?
Pressure - from investors, competitors, team members, or self-imposed deadlines - creates a bias toward action. When you feel pressure to 'do something,' AVOID TODAY asks whether the something you are about to do is the right something. Often, the pressure is real but the proposed action is not the right response to it. The board wants to see progress on a new market, but launching prematurely will create worse outcomes than launching deliberately in two months.
AVOID TODAY in the real world.
These are not hypothetical scenarios. They are patterns we see repeatedly in conversations with founders:
Do not start a vendor evaluation when the landscape is shifting. A founder was about to spend two weeks evaluating CRM platforms. But their product team was in the middle of defining a new customer segment that would change the CRM requirements entirely. AVOID TODAY: do the evaluation after the customer segmentation is finalized. Time saved: two weeks of premature evaluation. Better outcome: the eventual CRM choice was informed by the actual requirements.
Do not hire when a competitor acquisition changes the required profile. A startup was about to post a VP of Sales role when news broke that their primary competitor was being acquired by a larger company. The acquisition would change the competitive dynamics, potentially shifting the sales motion from competing against a startup to competing against an enterprise. AVOID TODAY: wait two weeks for the acquisition implications to become clearer. Result: the eventual VP of Sales job description included enterprise selling experience that was not in the original spec.
Do not respond to a pricing change you do not yet understand. A competitor dropped their entry-level pricing by 30%. The immediate impulse was to match or counter. AVOID TODAY: spend one week understanding why they dropped pricing (were they losing deals? shifting upmarket? clearing a segment they no longer want?) before deciding on a response. The investigation revealed the competitor was deliberately exiting the SMB segment to focus on enterprise. The right response was not a price cut - it was increased investment in SMB marketing.
Do not launch a feature because customers asked for it last quarter. Customer feedback from three months ago may not reflect current needs if the market has shifted. A founder was about to ship a feature based on customer requests from the previous quarter's feedback cycle. But three major customers had since churned for unrelated reasons, and two of the loudest requesters had adopted a workaround. AVOID TODAY: re-validate the demand with current customers before committing engineering resources. Result: the feature was deprioritized in favor of something more urgent.
How to build AVOID TODAY into your daily practice.
You do not need DESTA to use the AVOID TODAY framework. Here is how to apply it immediately:
Start each morning with a “not today” list. Before you write your to-do list, write a not-today list. Look at your calendar, your inbox, and your task queue. What is on there that should not be? What meeting could wait a week? What project is premature? What response would be reactive rather than strategic? Write these items down explicitly. Making the decision to not do something is just as much a decision as doing it, and it deserves the same deliberateness.
Apply the 72-hour rule for competitive responses. When a competitor makes a move that feels like it demands a response, wait 72 hours. Use that time to understand the move, assess its actual impact on your business, and determine whether a response is needed, and if so, what kind. Most competitive moves that feel urgent on Monday feel manageable by Thursday.
Ask your team “what should we stop?” in every weekly meeting. Most team meetings end with new action items. Try ending each meeting by asking what existing work can be paused, deprioritized, or cancelled based on what you have learned this week. This institutionalizes the AVOID TODAY mindset across the organization.
Review your AVOID TODAY decisions monthly. At the end of each month, look back at the things you chose not to do. Were those good decisions? Did any of them turn out to be items you should have acted on sooner? This review builds your judgment about timing - which is the underlying skill the AVOID TODAY framework develops.
How AVOID TODAY works in your DESTA brief.
In DESTA's daily operating brief, AVOID TODAY is a first-class category alongside DO, DELEGATE, and WATCH. When DESTA's analysis determines that a signal is relevant but the timing is wrong for action, it explicitly tells you to avoid acting on it today - and explains why.
A typical AVOID TODAY item in your brief might read: “Competitor X announced a partnership with Platform Y. This is relevant to your integration strategy, but the partnership details are vague and the actual product impact will not be clear for 4-6 weeks. Avoid starting integration planning until the partnership scope is publicly defined.”
This is not the same as ignoring the signal. DESTA is tracking it. When the partnership scope becomes clearer, DESTA will escalate the signal from AVOID TODAY to DO or DELEGATE with a specific recommendation. The signal moves through your system at the right pace, arriving on your active list only when the timing is right for a quality decision.
Over time, DESTA's outcome learning refines which signals belong in AVOID TODAY based on your past decisions. If you consistently act early on certain types of competitive moves and those actions produce good outcomes, DESTA learns that pattern and adjusts. If you consistently benefit from waiting on regulatory signals until enforcement dates are confirmed, DESTA learns that too.