Closing a Door on Purpose
Somewhere in most kitchens there is a drawer that won't close all the way. It holds rubber bands, a dead nine-volt battery, takeout menus from places that may not exist anymore, and one key nobody can identify. Nobody throws the key away. It might open something.
That key is a decent picture of how a lot of careful people run their working lives. They keep every option alive because any of them might turn out to matter, and the drawer gets fuller, and it stops closing.
"Keep your options open" sounds like the most sensible advice there is. It's hard to argue with on paper. Options have value; economists will tell you so, with equations. Committing early means giving up information you'd get by waiting. Who wants to be the person who signed up for the wrong thing when the right thing showed up a month later?
I used to find that argument airtight. I'm less sure now, mostly because of what the open options seem to cost while they sit there.
What an open door costs
An option you haven't closed doesn't sit quietly. It asks to be checked on. Imagine someone weighing two projects at work, both reasonable, and refusing to drop either one until the picture gets clearer. For six weeks they do a little of each. They attend both kickoff meetings. They answer emails from both teams, a bit slowly, because each reply has to be careful not to promise too much. At the end of six weeks, the picture is not clearer. It's the same picture, with less time left in it.
The equations that make options look valuable usually assume holding them is free. In ordinary life it almost never is. Each open door draws a little attention, the way a phone left face-up on the table draws your eyes even when it isn't ringing. Five open doors, and a real slice of your day goes to standing in hallways.
There's a quieter cost too. People can tell when you haven't committed. A team that suspects you might leave for the other project gives you the less interesting work, because why invest in someone with one foot out? So the option you kept open to protect yourself ends up making the current path worse, which makes the other path look better, which makes it harder to close. It feeds itself.
Psychologists have run studies where people chase doors that are about to vanish, even when what's behind them is worth less than what's in front of them. I don't want to lean too hard on one line of research. But the pattern rings true to anyone who has kept a gym membership, a half-learned language and a side project all technically "active" for years. Losing an option feels like a loss. Paying to keep it barely registers.
Closing one on purpose
So here's the counter-advice, and I'll admit it can be wrong. Close a door on purpose, before you're forced to, and before you feel entirely ready.
Not every door. Some choices really are worth waiting on, especially the expensive ones that can't be undone. If you're deciding where to live or whether to take on a large debt, more information is worth a lot, and a few extra weeks of not knowing is cheap by comparison. I'm not suggesting anyone sign a lease to feel decisive.
But most of the options cluttering a working week are small. Two competing tools for the same job. A course you might finish. An idea you've been meaning to pitch for a year, kept alive in a notes app with a title and no second sentence. For these, the value of waiting is close to nothing, and the cost of carrying them is steady.
A practical way to do it: once a month, pick one thing you've been keeping "in case" and end it out loud. Cancel the trial. Tell the other team you're staying where you are. Delete the note, or better, send the idea to someone who might actually use it. Then pay attention to how that week feels.
My guess, and it's only a guess, is that most people will feel lighter rather than poorer. The thing they gave up rarely comes back to haunt them. What they notice instead is the attention that returns, the way a room looks bigger after you take out one chair.
There's a fear underneath all this that's worth naming. Closing a door means you might be wrong, and you'll know it was your choice. Leaving it open lets you avoid ever being clearly wrong. Drifting feels safer because nobody can point to the moment you made the mistake. That safety is mostly an illusion, though. Not choosing is a choice with worse paperwork.
Some of the closed doors will turn out to have been the good ones. That happens. You'll hear about the project you passed on going well, and it will sting for an afternoon. But a person who commits and is sometimes wrong tends to get further than a person who never commits and is never technically wrong, simply because the first person is actually doing something with their days.
Back to the drawer. Throw out the battery. Toss the menus. Keep the mystery key if you want. One small superstition is allowed, as long as the drawer shuts.
Jonathan Endicott (Jonathan Weston Endicott) is an entrepreneur and creator who writes about building, momentum and discipline. More at about Jonathan Endicott, on Instagram at @jonathanwendicott and at linktr.ee/jonathanwestonendicott.