How to Decide

These tiny expenditures mount up over time until you have spent seven workweeks a year deciding what to eat, watch, and wear.

The ability to figure out when you can decide faster (and when you need to slow down) is a crucial decision skill to develop.

The faster you decide, the more you sacrifice accuracy.

THE TIME-ACCURACY TRADE-OFF Increasing accuracy costs time. Saving time costs accuracy.

You don’t want to waste too much time and you don’t want to sacrifice too much accuracy.

The key to achieving the right time-accuracy balance is figuring out what the penalty is for making a lower-quality decision than you would have if you had taken more time.

The smaller the penalty, the faster you can go. The bigger the penalty, the more time you should take on a decision. The smaller the impact of a poor outcome, the faster you can go. The bigger the impact, the more time you should take.

Regardless of whether your food is good or bad, it is unlikely to have any significant effect on your happiness in the long run. The same is also true if you watch the beginning of a bad movie on Netflix or wear pants that turn out to be uncomfortable.

choosing what to eat, watch, or wear are types of decisions that are low impact.

THE HAPPINESS TEST Ask yourself if the outcome of your decision, good or bad, will likely have a significant effect on your happiness in a year. If the answer is no, the decision passes the test, which means you can speed up. Repeat for a month and a week. The shorter the time period for which your answer is “no, it won’t much affect my happiness,” the more you can trade off accuracy in favor of saving time.

Regret (or fear of regret) can make you indecisive about nearly any choice.

Even though many decisions won’t have a significant impact on your long-term happiness, there is still a short-term cost of a bad result: regret.

Fear of regret costs time.

When a decision passes the Happiness Test, you can go fast. When an option repeats, you can go even faster, because getting another shot at the decision helps reduce what little cost there is of a bad outcome, as measured in regret, from a low-impact decision.

REPEATING OPTIONS When the same type of decision comes up over and over again, you get repeated chances to choose options, including options you may have rejected in the past.

Decisions that repeat also provide opportunities for choosing things you are less certain about, like a food you’ve never tried or a new TV show, because you don’t get penalized as heavily for taking those gambles. At little cost, you get information in return about your likes and dislikes, and you might find some surprises in there.

What’s the worst that can happen? If the outcome doesn’t go my way, am I worse off than I was before I made the decision?

freeroll isn’t so much about looking for situations with zero downside potential, but rather about looking for an asymmetry between the upside and downside potential of a decision.

In addition to impact obscuring the freeroll, the fear of failure or rejection can also be paralyzing, especially when there is a high probability that things won’t go your way.

You’re saving yourself from those short-lived feelings if the opportunity doesn’t pan out, but you’re costing yourself the chance for a meaningful, long-term boost to your well-being.