How to Make a Difficult Decision

Here is an observation that sounds wrong and is not. The decisions that torment us are, almost by definition, the ones where the options are close in value. If one option were clearly better, you would already have taken it and would not be lying awake. So the agony is not evidence that the stakes are enormous. It is evidence that the difference is small.

This has a strange consequence. In the genuinely close cases, the cost of choosing wrongly is by construction low, and the cost of not choosing is high and rising, because indecision consumes the one resource that is being spent in both scenarios: your time and attention. Which means the optimal strategy in a hard decision is frequently to decide quickly, and the optimal strategy in an easy decision is to think carefully — the precise opposite of what everyone does.

The exception is worth naming, because it is where the real difficulty hides. Some decisions look close but are not; they only look close because one side of the ledger contains things that are easy to count and the other contains things that are not. Salary, title, and square footage are countable. Whether you will like the person you become over the next four years is not. When these two categories are placed side by side, the countable one wins, not because it matters more but because it is legible, and legibility masquerades as importance.

So the useful work in a difficult decision is not deciding. It is making the uncountable side visible enough to compete. There is an old technique for this and it has nothing to do with probability. Flip a coin. Do not do what the coin says. Notice, in the half second while it is in the air, which result you were hoping for. That flicker is a report from the part of you that has already integrated all the illegible information and cannot express it in a spreadsheet. It is not infallible. It is, however, data you cannot obtain any other way, and it costs one second.

A second technique, for the decisions the coin cannot settle: write both futures as a plain paragraph, in the present tense, describing a Tuesday. Not the wedding, not the promotion, not the launch — an ordinary Tuesday in eighteen months under each option. Most bad decisions are made by comparing the highlights of one path with the ordinary days of the other. Comparing Tuesday to Tuesday removes that distortion, and it is remarkable how often it makes a torment collapse into an obvious answer within ten minutes.

There is one more thing, and it may be the most important. Nearly all decisions are less permanent than they feel at the moment of making them. People treat choices as doors when most of them are corridors: you can walk back, at a cost, and the cost is usually smaller than the cost of standing in the hallway for a year. The genuinely irreversible decisions in a life are few, and they are recognisable — they involve other people who did not choose, or bodies, or time that cannot be re-run. Those deserve the slow agony. The rest deserve a Tuesday, a coin, and a decision by Friday.

The relief people report after finally choosing is often mistaken for evidence that they chose correctly. It is not. It is evidence that the standing still was the expensive part all along.