How to Stop Being the Bottleneck in Your Company

By Antonio Neves

You stop being the bottleneck in your company by deciding, before you open email, which few things really need you today, and then giving your team a clear way to keep moving on everything else. In practice that's five moves: list everything that's waiting on you, run each item through two quick tests, answer one question before the inbox, put the rest of your decisions in one or two set windows, and turn the calls you make over and over into rules your team can use without asking.

Delegation is part of it. But the bigger fix is having a system for your own day. The company has a calendar, a scorecard and a plan. If you don't have one for yourself, every question in the building ends up in line behind you.

Nobody sets out to be the bottleneck. It usually starts as a strength. You know the product, the customers and the numbers better than anybody, so people bring you things. You answer fast. So they bring you more.

Then one day you look up and there's a line. A proposal waiting on your eyes. A hire waiting on your yes. A designer waiting on the feedback you said you'd send Tuesday. And "Got 5 minutes?" from three different people before lunch.

Even CEOs with whole teams around them live this way. When Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria tracked 27 CEOs for about three months each for Harvard Business Review, the CEOs worked an average of 62.5 hours a week, spent 72% of their work time in meetings, and spent 36% of their time reacting to issues as they came up. More than a third of the week went to whatever showed up.

The 1-Day Method puts it this way for leaders: You run everything. Who runs you? When the honest answer is nobody, your day gets run by whoever reaches you first. The work only you can do waits. And so does everybody who needs a decision from you.

I came to this from a different direction. In January 2025 my family lost our home in the Los Angeles wildfires. When I say we lost our home, I mean it doesn't exist. The chimney and the mailbox were the only things left standing.

Each morning after that, I asked myself one question: What will make today a success? Not the year, not the month, not the week. Just this day.

That question is the foundation of The 1-Day Method, and it's the first thing I'd hand a founder who feels like the company can't move without them. Because when you're the bottleneck, you're answering everybody else's questions all day and you still haven't answered your own.

If you want to try this tomorrow, the free 1-Day Method Starter Kit puts the morning question, your 3 priorities, the five daily acts and an end of day wins section on one page. Print it and fill in tomorrow's answer before you open email.

Take 10 minutes and list every decision, approval, reply and piece of feedback somebody is waiting on you for. This isn't your to do list. It's only the stuff where another person is stuck until you move.

Check Slack, your inbox, your calendar and your notes from the last few meetings. Write each one as a line: what it is, who's waiting, and how long they've been waiting. Don't fix anything yet. Just get the line on paper so you can see how long it actually is.

Two filters do most of the work here. They're the same two from How to Prioritize as a Founder When Everything Feels Urgent.

The "only me" test: Would this move forward if I didn't personally touch it?

The waiting test: What actually happens if this waits until tomorrow?

Be honest with the first one. If somebody on your team could make the call and you'd be fine with it 7 times out of 10, it isn't an only me item. Mark it to hand off. The items that pass both tests, where it truly needs you and waiting costs something real, are your short list for today.

Before email, before Slack, before the first meeting, ask: What will make today a success? Then pick your Essential 3, the three priorities that would make that answer true. Pull them from the short list you just made.

This matters for the bottleneck problem because the inbox is where the line forms. Open it first and every request in there gets to argue for your attention before you've decided what today is for. Answer the question first and you walk into the inbox already knowing which requests move today and which ones get a time instead. If the inbox keeps winning, start with how to stop checking email first thing in the morning.

A lot of the bottleneck feeling comes from the drip. A question at 9:10, another at 9:40, one more in the hallway on the way to a meeting. Each one is small. Together they eat the morning and leave your team guessing when they'll hear back.

Pick one or two decision windows a day, say 30 minutes at 11:30 and 30 minutes at 4:00. Tell your team that anything that needs your yes gets an answer in the next window. Then keep the promise. When someone asks for 5 minutes outside a window, give them a real time instead of a yes you can't keep: "I'll get you an answer at 4."

That way nobody has to chase you, and you're not making calls between meetings with half your attention. If your afternoons are stacked, you can put a window right after the last meeting. There's more on that gap in how to refocus after back to back meetings.

Go back to your list from step 1. Some of those items are the same decision showing up in different clothes. A discount request. A refund. A small purchase. Which vendor to use for a one off job.

Every time you make the same call twice, write the rule down so your team can make it the third time without you. Something like: "If it's under $500, we can undo it, and the customer's happy, decide and tell me after."

Jeff Bezos wrote about this in his 2016 letter to Amazon shareholders. He split decisions into the ones you can reverse and the ones you can't, and argued the reversible ones deserve a light process. He also wrote that most decisions should probably be made "with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had," and that "being wrong may be less costly than you think."

None of this works if your team doesn't know about it. They've been trained to bring everything to you, and to be fair, you trained them. So tell them plainly. Something like:

"I've been slowing you down, and I'm changing how I work. Starting this week I'll answer anything that needs my yes at 11:30 and 4:00. If it's reversible and under $500, make the call and tell me after. If you're not sure whether something needs me, ask yourself whether it would still move if I were on a plane today."

Then at the end of the day, look at your page and ask two things. Did the Essential 3 move? Is anyone still waiting on me who shouldn't be? If the same kind of request keeps landing on your list, there's a rule you haven't written yet. If you want to track this across a week, the personal scorecard for leaders has a four line version.

One more thing. If you're the bottleneck because you're running on empty, a better calendar won't fix it. If you're exhausted most days, not sleeping, or going through the motions with your team, talk to a doctor or a therapist.

It means work slows down or stops because it's waiting on you: a decision, an approval, feedback or a reply. Your team has the capacity to keep going, but things sit in line until you get to them.

List everything someone is waiting on you for right now. If the list is long, if people have to chase you for answers, or if projects stall when you travel, you're the bottleneck.

Start with repeat decisions you can undo, like small discounts, refunds, routine purchases and vendors for one off jobs. Write a rule for each one so your team can decide without you, and look at the results once a week.

Separate the decisions you can reverse from the ones you can't. Hand off the reversible ones with a clear rule and a limit, like a dollar amount, and keep the ones you can't undo. Jeff Bezos made the same split in his 2016 letter to Amazon shareholders: reversible decisions deserve a lighter process.

Yes, if it makes you decide what today is for before the requests start. The 1-Day Method Planner starts each day with one question, What will make today a success?, then your Essential 3, so you know which requests need you today and which ones get a set time.

The 1-Day Method Planner is the paper version of the question I asked every morning after the fire. Each day has room for your answer to "What will make today a success?", your Essential 3, up to five focused tasks, the Top 5 and your wins. That's steps 2 and 3 of this post on one page: the items that pass the only me test become your Essential 3, and everything else goes to a decision window instead of your day. It's undated, it covers 90 days, a full quarter, it takes under 5 minutes a day, and it's $29.99.

The book, The 1-Day Method, is short on purpose. It walks through the question, the Essential 3 and the Top 5.

If your whole leadership team has this problem, The 1-Day Method also runs workshops for teams. You can book a call on the workshops page.

Not ready to buy anything? Grab the free Starter Kit and write tomorrow's 3 only me items on it tonight.

Antonio Neves is an author, keynote speaker, and former journalist for NBC, PBS, and MTV Networks. He's delivered more than 400 keynotes for companies like Google, McDonald's, and Visa. After his family lost their home in the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, he created The 1-Day Method to rebuild his life one day at a time.