What Doing Nothing Costs
Choosing to leave the position alone is a real decision with a real price, and the price is payable in the months when something goes wrong.
How would I even find out where I stand?
The law where you areWho decides it if I push?
The law where you areWhat does raising it cost me?
Only what happensWhat happens to the relationship afterwards?
Four questions a person in this position actually asks. One of them has no answer anybody can give in advance, and nothing here fills a blank with a guess. This is the section that will not tell you whether to do it.
What one person decided to carry themselves, having chosen not to raise anything
Cover for a month when they could not work
Only if they agreeHow you would use it: Income protection appropriate to the trade, arranged while well, with the exclusions read before buying
Something to absorb a quiet month
Yours either wayHow you would use it: A fixed proportion of each payment moved out on the day it arrives, into an account that is not the working one
Provision for later life
Depends where you areHow you would use it: Whatever arrangements are open to people in your category where you are, set up once and maintained at a level that survives a thin year
A second client, so one ending is not the year
Only if they agreeHow you would use it: Capacity kept back deliberately, which means accepting slightly less from the main client this month
Notice worth having
Not in this positionProtection against the work simply stopping
Not in this positionSix things, and the two with nothing under them are the two that would have come from a different category. A right you cannot use is not a protection, and this sign will not print one without saying how you would use it. One person's own arrangement; what any category carries differs by jurisdiction.
Choosing to leave your position as it is counts as a decision, and it has a price. The price is not payable this month; it falls due in the month something goes wrong, which is why it is so easy to defer.
The practical question in “What Doing Nothing Costs” is easier to handle when expectations and evidence are visible to both sides. For teams assessing remote desktop monitoring software, open the provider’s practical outline can provide time and project context, but the purpose should be disclosed, access limited and every consequential interpretation reviewed by a person.
This article is about naming it so the choice is made rather than drifted into.
Another practical source for the issue raised in “What Doing Nothing Costs” is Contra independent-work articles. Record which points apply and which still need confirmation from a qualified local adviser.
Why it is the common choice
Because raising it costs the things in the previous article, because the work is steady, and because most people would rather have the income than the argument.
That is a reasonable position held by sensible people. Nothing here argues against it; the argument is only for knowing what it leaves you carrying.
What you are carrying
Whatever your category does not provide: the weeks you cannot work, the month with nothing in it, the ending without warning, and whatever is not being set aside.
Each has an article in this collection and each has a price that can be estimated. Together they are the cost of the position.
Putting a figure on it
Crude and useful. Take the three or four things your category does not carry, estimate what each would cost you if it happened, and multiply by a rough likelihood over a few years.
The result is wrong and it is far better than the unexamined feeling that it will probably be fine.
Carrying it deliberately
The difference between this and drifting. A person who has decided to self-insure has a reserve, cover where it is available, more than one client and something going aside.
A person who has decided nothing has the same exposure and none of those, which is the same position with the preparation removed.
The four things that actually substitute
Across this whole collection the same four keep appearing, because they are the only protections genuinely available to somebody in this position:
- More than one client.
- Money held back as a matter of routine.
- Cover appropriate to your trade, where it exists.
- Your own records, kept as you go.
None requires anybody's permission and all four are built in the good months.
What accrues quietly
Where something is genuinely owed to you and never claimed, it frequently keeps accruing — and frequently stops being recoverable after a period.
Deciding to do nothing is therefore sometimes a decision to let something expire. Knowing the time limits, even if you choose not to act, means that is a choice rather than an accident.
Revisiting it
The position changes: the work grows, the other clients fall away, the rules move, the arrangement drifts. A decision taken two years ago was taken about a different situation.
An annual look — the same twenty minutes recommended through this collection — is what keeps the choice current.
When doing nothing stops being viable
Recognisable signals: the arrangement now fills your whole week, there are no other clients, the reserve has gone, and the work is directed day to day.
At that point the exposure is concentrated and the preparation is absent, which is the one combination this collection would say is worth acting on — by building the four things above, if nothing else.
The thing that is still worth doing
Finding out, even if you act on nothing. The exercise in the article on how you find out costs an evening and an hour, and it converts an unexamined position into a known one.
People who have done it report the same thing: not relief exactly, but the end of a particular kind of background worry.
What this collection is actually for
Not persuading anybody to challenge anything. Most readers of something like this will do nothing with their category and everything with the four protections, which is the right outcome for most people.
The point is to make the position visible enough to plan around.
The annual twenty minutes
A fixed date, four questions:
- Has anything changed about what my category carries?
- Has the arrangement itself drifted since last year?
- Are the four protections actually in place?
- Is anything approaching a time limit?
That is the whole maintenance requirement for a decision to leave things alone, and it is what keeps the decision honest rather than abandoned.
The part that remains open
Whether anything will go wrong, and when. Nobody can tell you, and the whole structure of this position is that the bad month arrives without notice.
That is the one blank nothing closes — not a challenge, not advice, not any category. What the four protections do is change what the bad month costs, which is the most that was ever available.