Not deciding is a decision, and rarely a free one
Leaving a question open feels like keeping your options alive, and quite often it is quietly closing them.
Delay presents itself as neutral. Nothing has been chosen, nothing has been lost, the matter can be revisited. But the world moves while you are not deciding. The item sells out, the offer expires, the other person makes their own arrangements, the problem you were going to address becomes the way things are done. Every one of those is an outcome, and it is an outcome you selected by not selecting. The only difference is that it does not feel like yours, which is precisely what makes it attractive. Under a deadline the effect sharpens: gathering more information feels like progress right up to the moment the deadline passes and the choice is made for you.
The comfort of delay comes from a quirk in how we account for mistakes. An error you actively made is yours in a way an error you allowed is not, so postponing shifts the blame off your ledger even when the result is identical or worse. Noticing this does not require any grand resolve. It requires asking, when you catch yourself deferring, what the world will look like if the question is still open in a month, and whether you would choose that outcome on purpose. Sometimes you would. Waiting is often correct, particularly when information is genuinely on its way.
So the distinction to hold onto is between waiting and drifting. Waiting has a reason and an end: I will decide when the report arrives, or on Friday, whichever comes first. Drifting has neither, and dresses itself up as the first. The test is whether you can say what will be true when the wait is over. If you cannot, you are not gathering information, you are avoiding the discomfort of committing, and the cost of that is real even though it never appears on any invoice. The cheap repair is to give every open question a date, however arbitrary, since an arbitrary deadline you can revise beats an indefinite one you never examine.