Dr Leigh Beveridge, a physician scientist and senior medical director based in Victoria, Australia, has announced a new personal rule for how he makes decisions and manages information in his clinical development and teaching work.
MELBOURNE, AU / ACCESS Newswire / January 21, 2026 / Dr Leigh Beveridge today announced a new personal policy that he calls his Decision Hygiene Rule, a structured approach to how he vets information, commits to projects and sets boundaries around his time in biotechnology and education.
The policy centres on one principle: no important decision without clear evidence, a defined objective and a check on personal capacity.
"In late stage drug development, unclear decisions are expensive," Beveridge said. "I realised my own habits needed to match the level of rigour I expect in a clinical trial."
The Decision Hygiene Rule applies to major work commitments, new initiatives and high impact choices in his calendar. For any such decision, he now requires three things: a one page evidence summary, a simple success metric and a clear reason why he is the right person to be involved.
"I treat my own calendar like a protocol now," Beveridge explained. "If the aim is vague, the evidence is weak or the roles are unclear, the default answer is no or not yet."
He traces the change back to years of balancing hospital work, global haematology programmes, postgraduate study and mentoring.
"I reached a point where my schedule looked impressive on paper but did not reflect where I actually added value," he said. "This policy is my way of aligning effort with impact."
The broader problem
Beveridge's move responds to issues he has seen across medicine, biotech and business education:
Up to 50 percent of clinicians report symptoms of burnout in some surveys, often linked to workload and decision fatigue.
Knowledge workers can spend more than 60 percent of their week in meetings and email.
Research on medical errors has associated cognitive overload with higher risk of mistakes in complex environments.
Studies of organizational behaviour have found that unclear decision processes reduce both performance and psychological safety.
"Many of us in science and healthcare were trained to tolerate overload," Beveridge noted. "We were not trained to design our own decision systems."
What changed
The policy grew from a simple audit Beveridge did on his own time. He reviewed three months of commitments across his industrial and teaching roles and sorted them into three categories: high impact and energising, necessary but routine, and low value.
The pattern was clear. High impact work often had structured preparation and clear outcomes. Low value work was tied to vague aims, ambiguous ownership or poorly filtered information.
"I saw that I was applying high standards to trial design and much lower standards to how I decided what to work on," he said. "That inconsistency did not make sense."
From that review, he defined his Decision Hygiene Rule and began applying it first to new meeting requests, then to project roles, and finally to strategic decisions about career direction.
Why it works
The policy is built on practices Beveridge has already used in clinical development:
Evidence first: decisions are anchored in succinct summaries of data, not long slide decks or anecdote.
Clear endpoints: each commitment must have a simple and realistic definition of success.
Role clarity: he must be able to state in one or two sentences why he is the right person to be involved.
"Drug development forces you to be honest about trade offs," Beveridge said. "I wanted the same level of clarity in how I invest my own attention."
How success is measured
Beveridge measures the effect of the policy in three ways:
Calendar composition: he tracks the percentage of time spent on work that is both high impact and energizing.
Decision quality: he reviews major decisions every quarter and asks whether the outcomes matched the original aims and evidence.
Energy and focus: he monitors his own sense of cognitive load and ability to do deep work, especially during critical phases of clinical programmes or teaching blocks.
He reports early results in more focused weeks, fewer low value meetings and clearer conversations about scope and responsibility.
Copy my approach: 10 steps anyone can use
Beveridge encourages others to adapt the Decision Hygiene idea in simple steps:
Do a three week calendar audit and mark each activity as high impact, necessary, or low value.
Choose one category of decisions, such as new projects or recurring meetings, to apply the rule to first.
For that category, require a one page summary of purpose, context and expected outcomes before you agree.
Define a single primary success metric for each new commitment in plain language.
Ask yourself: why am I the right person for this. If you cannot answer quickly, reconsider or reshape the role.
Introduce a 24 hour pause for non urgent high impact decisions to reduce emotional bias.
Schedule a weekly 30 minute review to decline, delegate or redesign low value commitments.
Use a simple traffic light system in your calendar notes: green for energizing, amber for neutral, red for draining. Adjust over time.
Once a quarter, review one major decision, compare the original evidence and aims with actual outcomes, and note what you would change.
Share a light version of your rule with close colleagues so expectations around your time and decisions are transparent.
Beveridge invites readers to experiment in a small way.
"Do not try to rebuild your entire life in one week," he said. "Pick one step, apply it for 30 days and track what changes."
He suggests starting with a simple practice: require a clear purpose and success metric for any new recurring meeting before accepting it, and note the results at the end of a month.
"If you can improve even 10 percent of your decisions, the compound effect over a career is significant," Beveridge said.
About Dr Leigh Beveridge
Dr Leigh Beveridge is a physician scientist and senior medical director based in Victoria, Australia. He has worked across internal medicine, haematology and global clinical development, including senior roles at Servier and Genentech in haematology and immunology. He holds an MBBS from the University of Tasmania, advanced degrees in pharmaceutical and medical device development from the University of Sydney, and an MBA from the University of California, Davis, where he also teaches in the Online MBA programme.
Media Contact
Dr. Leigh Beveridge
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https://www.drleighbeveridge.com/
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