Write it down
“Whenever someone asks me to do something that I think seems ill-conceived in some way, I ask them to write it down. That’s it. Because writing is high effort. Making sentences is the easy bit, it’s the thinking I want them to do. By considering their request it slows them down. Maybe 30% of the time or something, they come back and say ‘oh, that thing I asked you to do, I’ve had a think and it’s fine, we don’t need to do it’.”
This is such good advice. I find writing is the way I think, so even jotting things down in a notebook helps me to clarify what I'm thinking. And in a team environment, clarity is so helpful, it will cut down on the amount of time spent spinning to figure out what the other person means.