Entropy doesn’t wait. That’s the brutal reality behind the 72-hour rule. In business, in creative work, in leadership—clarity has a half-life. If you don’t capture and act on it within three days, it starts to decay. What was once strong, differentiating signal erodes into noise.
I’ve seen this decay everywhere: in strategy decks that sit too long before being acted on, in product ideas trapped in endless committee review, and in something deceptively small but universal—feedback.
Feedback is the perfect case study in entropy. At first glance, it feels like a gift, a chance to sharpen your work. And it can be—if you treat it with urgency. But over time, the value of feedback follows a predictable curve: from clarity to courtesy to clutter.
The Half-Life of Feedback
Imagine you’ve just written a draft of an article, a product positioning statement, or a new strategic framework. You send it to your team and ask for feedback.
The first responses you get are usually the best. These people engage right away because they’re invested. They care about the work, they have a perspective, and they want to help. Their comments are specific, contextual, and actionable. They sharpen your signal.
This is the first wave: feedback that compounds clarity.
But then comes the second wave. These responses arrive a little later. The contributors may not have deep conviction, but they want to be helpful—or at least appear helpful. They don’t want to say no when you ask for input, so they provide something. Their feedback often sounds like:
• “This sentence could be shorter.”
• “Have you thought about adding an example?”
• “Not sure, but maybe flip these two sections?”
None of this is damaging. But none of it is essential either. It’s feedback for the sake of feedback. Signal is flattening.
Finally, the third wave rolls in. This is where entropy wins. These are the people who respond out of obligation, late in the cycle, often after you’ve already incorporated the best ideas. Their comments are rushed, vague, or contradictory. Sometimes they just fill in the form so it looks like they participated.
That’s when your clarity gets buried under clutter. What began as syntropy—order and coherence—devolves into entropy: noise and dilution.
Why It Happens
This isn’t about people being careless or malicious. It’s about physics. Information degrades as it travels. The longer you wait, the more diffusion happens: urgency dissipates, attention fragments, and the context that made the first wave’s feedback sharp begins to fade.
The same principle applies to strategic insights, creative sparks, or market observations. If you don’t move fast enough, entropy creeps in. Competitors notice the same patterns. Customers shift. The idea loses its edge.
That’s why I argue that syntropy has a half-life of 72 hours. After that, novelty collapses into consensus, insight becomes cliché, and your advantage turns into table stakes.
Shipping as Entropy Insurance
The 72-hour rule is not about working frantically or rushing for the sake of speed. It’s about protecting the value of clarity by acting before it decays.
When you capture an insight in a Monday meeting, ship something by Thursday. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to be alive.
Here’s what happens when you ship fast:
- You lock in clarity. Acting quickly preserves the integrity of the original idea before it’s diluted by overthinking or unnecessary feedback.
- You generate fresh syntropy. Shipping creates a new round of signal, this time grounded in real-world response. Reality is the sharpest editor.
- You build velocity. Each cycle of insight-to-shipment strengthens your organization’s muscle memory. Momentum compounds.
Contrast this with the entropy path: endless review cycles, consensus building, and “just one more round of feedback.” By the time you ship, the signal has already decayed into noise.
A Case in Point
A client once came to me with what I can only describe as a million-dollar insight. It was the kind of positioning idea that could reset the trajectory of their company. Their plan? Spend three months polishing the strategy before going to market.
We convinced them to ship in six weeks instead. Not perfect, but fast enough to seize the moment. By the time their competitors launched similar campaigns months later, it was too late. The market had already absorbed the idea. The signal had become theirs. The competitors were left shipping entropy.
That’s the power of the 72-hour rule.
Why Feedback Feels Safe but Isn’t
One of the biggest reasons leaders fall into entropy is the false safety of feedback. Asking for more opinions feels like due diligence. It feels responsible. It feels like you’re protecting against mistakes.
But too much feedback doesn’t protect you. It erodes you.
The first wave of feedback sharpens your work. The second wave distracts. The third wave undermines. By then, the cost of delay outweighs the value of inclusion. What you’re really doing is trading clarity for comfort.
Comfort is entropy’s favorite disguise.
The Laws of Syntropy in Action
You can think of this as a set of laws, just as clear as the laws of thermodynamics:
- The First Law of Syntropy: Syntropy in motion tends to stay in motion. Once you act on clarity, new clarity follows.
- The Second Law of Syntropy: The rate of decay is proportional to the delay. The longer you wait between creation and implementation, the faster your signal turns into noise .
These laws apply everywhere:
• A sales insight that isn’t shared within three days turns into forgotten chatter.
• A customer quote that isn’t documented and shipped into messaging decays into misremembered anecdotes.
• A creative spark that isn’t acted on quickly fades into a vague “we had an idea about that once.”
How to Apply the 72-Hour Rule
The discipline is simple but not easy. It requires cultural change. Here are some ways to operationalize it:
• Set 72-hour deadlines for action items. Don’t give yourself or your team a week to act on insights. Force the habit of shipping fast.
• Close feedback loops quickly. Take the first wave of high-signal feedback, act on it, and move. Resist the urge to wait for every last voice.
• Protect signal fidelity. Record insights as they happen—through transcripts, notes, or shared documents—so they don’t degrade in memory.
• Reward velocity, not perfection. Celebrate teams for shipping fast, even if imperfect, rather than polishing endlessly.
• Build feedback filters. Encourage your team to distinguish between sharpening feedback (signal) and courtesy feedback (noise).
The Deeper Lesson
The 72-hour rule isn’t about being impulsive. It’s about recognizing entropy as the natural state of all systems. Left alone, clarity decays. Signal dissipates. Insight erodes.
Your job as a leader, a creator, or a strategist is to fight that decay. To protect syntropy by acting before entropy wins.
Feedback shows us how the decay works in miniature. First it sharpens. Then it flattens. Then it dilutes. The same curve applies to every idea, every insight, every moment of clarity.
You have a choice every time you create or discover syntropy: ship it, or watch it die in the slow suffocation of over-processing.
That’s why the 72-hour rule matters. Not because three days is a magic number, but because entropy doesn’t wait. And neither should you