Where you're the bottleneck

Overview

Every manager is a bottleneck somewhere, usually without knowing it. The decision you’ve been meaning to make, the review sitting in your queue, the approval nobody wants to chase you for: each is a small piece of someone else’s work, stalled, with your name on it. This preset finds those pieces and tells you what to do with each.

What this is for

This preset solves the invisible-bottleneck problem. Work waiting on you rarely announces itself. People are too polite to nag, so a decision you could make in five minutes blocks a project for a week, and you never feel the cost because it’s not your work that’s stuck. The pile-up is real but distributed, invisible from where you sit.

The Where you’re the bottleneck preset makes it visible. Each Monday it reads recent check-ins, blockers, and goal updates for the things that appear to be waiting on you, then recommends a disposition for each: decide it now, delegate it to someone closer, or schedule it deliberately so it stops floating. You clear your own queue before it quietly throttles everyone downstream.

Who should use this

Senior managers and executives whose sign-off sits in the critical path of more work than they realize. You’ll see what’s stalled behind you and a clear call on each item.

Managers learning to delegate who hold onto decisions out of habit. You’ll get a weekly nudge on what someone else could be deciding instead of you.

Anyone who feels perpetually behind on small asks that pile into a backlog. You’ll process the queue in one pass with a recommended action attached to each.

The prompt

Based on recent check-ins, blockers, and goal updates, identify the decisions, reviews, or approvals that appear to be waiting on me specifically. For each, recommend whether I should decide it now, delegate it, or schedule it, and explain why.

How to use

Click here to create a new Echo using this preset. You'll be able to customize the prompt and schedule before it starts generating answers.