April 15 is tax day in the United States. I submitted my documents to a new accountant on March 20, per his deadline. When I asked if everything was in order, he replied, “Yes, it’s fine.”
That was the last I heard from him.
Two days before the filing deadline, I followed up by email. No response. On the morning of April 15, I called. Still no response. By noon, I reached out to his wife. Shortly after, he replied he was working on it and would complete it that day.
Minutes later, he asked for information I had already provided. Then another request came in for something already included in my submission.
At that point, the issue was no longer just delay.
Even if the return were completed that day, I would still need time to review and sign. Now I was watching my inbox, ready to respond immediately. If I missed the window, the filing would be late, and I would bear the penalty.
The return arrived at 4:40pm. The office closes at 5pm. I had 20 minutes to review, sign, and pay. I found an error, sent it back, and he corrected it by 4:59pm. But the updated return did not arrive until 5:20pm, after the office had already closed. I managed to pay online in time.
That sequence is the real cost of being a bottleneck. Not simply delay, but the transfer of urgency, attention, and risk to someone else.
Most work moves through dependency. Your output is someone else’s input. When that flow is interrupted, the person downstream does not just slow down. They lose the margin needed to recover. Being “on time” can still mean you have made someone else late.
Proverbs 3:27 puts it plainly: “Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to act.” The real deadline is not the final due date, but the moment someone else needs your output. Miss that, and you compress the system, even if the formal deadline is technically met.
Compressed systems produce lower quality work, where details are missed, information is overlooked, and rework appears downstream.
There is, however, a second trap.
Some people make sure they are never the bottleneck. They prioritize dependent work so others can move forward, pushing their own work to the edges of the day. I do this too, and it often costs me my evenings.
But it raises a harder question: if you are always absorbing delays, are you enabling a system where slowness has no consequence?
When your margin is always available, the system never feels the pressure to improve.
Philippians 2:4 calls us to look not only to our own interests, but also to the interests of others, both those waiting on us and those quietly carrying the system.
Don’t be the bottleneck. And don’t become the silent shock absorber.
Make dependencies visible. When they are absorbed silently, the system appears stable only because someone is paying the cost out of sight.
Delays don’t disappear. They show up later as pressure, risk, or penalties that someone has to absorb.