Follow-up: The underestimated principle of experts

The myth of the empty desk

There are managers who swear by a tidy desk as a sign of mental clarity. Then there are those whose office looks like a crime scene after a paper bomb explosion. And finally, there is a third group: people who have realised that the real question is not where information is located, but when it will reappear.

The follow-up is older than email, older than Post-its, older than most management methods that vie for our attention today with English acronyms. It dates back to a time when office work still meant carrying physical files from A to B. The key point: instead of processing everything immediately or letting it disappear into a pile, a file was deliberately placed in a folder with a date on it. On the corresponding day, it reappeared – as if by magic, only more reliably.

What at first sounds like analogue nostalgia is in fact a principle of captivating elegance. It solves a problem that grows with every Slack message, every meeting minutes and every ‘quick consultation’: cognitive overload from information that is not relevant now – but will become crucial at some point.

Why our brains keep poor records

In the 1920s, psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik discovered an effect that is more relevant today than ever: our brains keep unfinished tasks more present than completed ones. What seems to make sense from an evolutionary perspective – the sabre-toothed tiger should not be forgotten – mutates into constant mental bombardment in the modern working world. Every open email, every unclear responsibility, every postponed decision takes up space in our working memory.

David Allen has turned this into a methodology in ‘Getting Things Done’: capture, clarify, organise, reflect, act. The crucial step that many overlook is organising – and this is where the follow-up becomes the secret hero. David calls it the ‘tickler file’, others refer to it as the ‘43-folder system’. The principle remains the same: don't do everything immediately, but don't forget anything either. Instead, bring it back to the table at the right time.

Anyone who believes that a good memory can replace a good system is confusing retentiveness with capacity. Managers make dozens of decisions every day. Each of them has context, background and dependencies. Keeping this context in your head is not a skill – it's a waste. The head is for thinking, not for storing.

From file to architecture

The classic follow-up had a design flaw: it was one-dimensional. A process reappeared on a specific day – but without any connection to related topics, without being embedded in a larger context. Anyone who put the quarterly review on follow-up on 15 March received a stack of paper on 15 March. Was this stack linked to the strategic initiative that had been decided two weeks earlier? No such luck.

Modern knowledge management thinks differently. Tiago Forte's ‘Building a Second Brain’ and Sönke Ahrens' work on Nikolas Luhman's card index principle show that the value of information lies not in its existence, but in its interconnectedness. A noted decision is good. A decision that is linked to the project, the person involved and the overarching goal becomes a resource.

This is where the real evolution of resubmission lies: from a chronological reminder system to a contextual decision-making network. Not just when something becomes relevant, but what it belongs to. Not just the date, but the context.

A CFO who has to make an investment decision in three months' time needs more than just a reminder of the deadline. They need the original analysis, the COO's objections from the last board meeting, the updated market data and the strategic guidelines that were defined a year ago. Anything else is piecemeal.

Commitment through structure

There is a reason why pilots use checklists even though they have practised every move hundreds of times. And there is a reason why experienced surgeons go through a time-out procedure before every operation. In critical situations, no one relies on intuition alone.

Leadership is not surgery – but the parallel goes further than you might think. Decisions that seem insignificant today will have an impact in six months' time. The conversation with the junior manager, the unclear resource commitment, the vaguely worded project assignment – all these are seeds from which either successes or problems will grow later on.

Follow-ups achieve what meetings rarely deliver: commitment through structure. Not the hope that someone will remember. But the certainty that the topic will reappear at a defined time – with context, with history, with a basis for decision-making.

This is not control. It is caring for your own thinking. And for the people who depend on clear statements.

The Eisenhower fallacy

The Eisenhower Matrix divides tasks into urgent and important. Anything that is neither is deleted. That's the theory. In practice, however, many issues today are neither urgent nor obviously important – but in six weeks' time they will be explosive. The market rumour that a colleague mentioned in passing. A customer's casual remark. The strategic question that got lost in day-to-day business.

Those who sort tasks solely according to urgency and obvious importance optimise for the present and neglect the future. The follow-up adds a third dimension to the matrix: time. It allows potentially important issues to be put on hold without being forgotten – and to be revisited precisely when their relevance becomes apparent or should become apparent.

The Pareto principle teaches us that 20 per cent of the causes produce 80 per cent of the effects. The trick is to identify this 20 per cent. And sometimes this identification requires time, distance and a second look – scheduled specifically.

What remains

In a world that has elevated ‘immediately’ to the standard mode, resubmission is a silent act of resistance. It says: Not everything has to be decided now. But nothing should be forgotten.

For managers, this means less mental juggling and more structured clarity. Less reliance on their own memory and more trust in a system that delivers when it matters.

The best decision-makers are not those with the fullest schedules or the fastest reactions. They are those who know what they know – and when they need to know it.

The rest is follow-up.