Decision Tax Is Draining Your Content ROI
The collective toll of debating instead of creating.
Every content request that lands in your inbox carries a hidden cost that never shows up on a budget spreadsheet.
I call it Decision Tax, and it's bleeding marketing teams dry without them even noticing.
Think about it. Every piece of content that gets proposed, debated, created, and distributed consumes organizational energy—meetings to discuss it, emails to review it, time to produce it.
It's every status meeting that should've been an email, every review cycle that adds nothing, every "quick sync" that kills momentum.
And it's costing you more than you think.
What's At Stake
When this tax goes unchecked, the symptoms are painfully obvious. Your best writers spend more time in meetings than writing. Your designers create thirteen versions of the same asset because one more person needs to review.
Your team's creative energy gets sapped by endless revisions and stakeholder debates. They have no gas left in their tanks for other high-impact work.
Decision Tax is the steep price you pay when every content idea gets a committee instead of conviction.
I've been there, unfortunately.
My team once spent 14 days—yes, 14 shameful days—getting a single homepage headline approved.
We started with a clear, compelling vision. Then we threw it in the corporate blender of stakeholder reviews, revisions, and countless drive-bys with "just one more quick thought."
What emerged was a watery soup of meaningless superlatives that no one loved but everyone could tolerate. All told, that single headline burned over 120 hours of company time. And by launch day, we were too exhausted to fight for what we'd lost.
Look, I'm not proud. But this isn't an isolated horror story.
Every day, marketing teams waste hundreds of valuable hours on low-stakes decisions that don't warrant the attention. Worse yet, all that deliberation often produces worse outcomes.
The cruel irony is that we pay Decision Tax twice—once with time and again with quality.
The Decision Tax Rate Is Rising
The IRS has nothing on these three market forces driving up our Decision Tax liability:
AI solved the production problem. Five years ago, creating quality content required significant time and specialized skills. Today, AI generates serviceable drafts in seconds. Meanwhile, our decision-making and creative-thinking abilities remain stubbornly human. The result? Marketing teams face an overwhelming flood of content possibilities with no reliable way to separate high-value opportunities from time-wasting larks.
Executives are increasingly risk-averse. As content becomes more visible and permanent, executives get increasingly paranoid about what goes public. Every piece of content now represents a potential reputation risk, leading execs to overly scrutinize even minor decisions. What used to be a marketing director's call now requires VP or C-suite sign off, and by the time it's approved, it's lost its personality and punch.
Everyone's an armchair critic. Everyone wants a say in content decisions, but they seldom bring expertise. Marketing teams now field input from product, sales, legal, and executives—each adding their perspectives and preferences without understanding audience needs or marketing principles. And those added voices often lead to muddled compromises.
What makes Decision Tax truly insidious is that the slow drain on resources masks itself as productivity.
Your calendar is full. Your team is busy. Everyone's giving input. And suddenly, without realizing it, you're the marketing leader with a team that's working harder than ever but somehow delivering less real impact.
It's time to stop paying taxes on decisions that don't matter and start investing in the ones that get returns.
Next week, I'll bring my framework for slashing Decision Tax and turning your content into an appreciating asset. Until then…
Worth Noting
Decision Fatigue is Real – Neuroscience research shows that decision quality declines dramatically throughout the day as mental resources are depleted. When your team debates 13 small content decisions before lunch, they've got nothing left for the strategic thinking that actually matters.
CMOs Are Fighting Invisible Battles – According to McKinsey, only half of CEO-CMO pairs at the same company agree on marketing's primary role. Think about that. How can you possibly make efficient decisions when you can't even agree what game you're playing? This fundamental disconnect is Decision Tax in its purest form—marketing leaders spending precious energy just trying to get everyone on the same page.
Corporate Approvals Are So 2020 – Marketing teams are shifting budget from traditional ads to brand-led content that builds trust. But many aren't prepared to abandon the rigid corporate approval processes designed for ads—effectively strangling the authenticity that makes creator-style content work in the first place.
Try This
Run a Decision Tax Audit at your next team meeting:
Map the paper trail. Pick a recent content initiative and track down every version, from messy first draft to final version. Lay them out chronologically on a conference table (or, you know, do it digitally).
Play "spot the difference." Compare the first solid draft with the final version. Ask your team: "Did our extensive review process meaningfully improve the content, or did we just make it different?"
Calculate the real cost. Tally the total person-hours spent on revisions, meetings, and feedback rounds from that first solid draft to final version. Then ask: "If we had invested those same hours in other projects, what could we have accomplished?"
Create a decision-free zone. Identify one upcoming project where you'll dramatically limit stakeholders and approval stages. Document your new process and commit to it publicly.
This exercise won't solve everything, but it will give you evidence to push back on unnecessary review cycles and build momentum for a more efficient process.
Napkin Notes
"You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems." – James Clear
The traditional CMO is vanishing. Major brands like Starbucks, Uber, and UPS are eliminating their CMO roles entirely, redistributing responsibilities across multiple executives. Only 36% of Fortune 500 top marketers still hold the traditional CMO title.
CFOs actually support brand marketing? That's what Peep Laja says (sort of) with this data. Think the story would change with a larger sample size?