Small decisions take you forever? How to make everyday choices faster

It is 1 a.m. and you have fourteen tabs open for one laptop

You just finished a double shift. Your laptop died yesterday, and you need a new one by the weekend. Nothing fancy: email, bills, a show now and then.

You have three review sites open, two comparison tables and a forum thread where strangers argue about keyboard flex. You are down to four models that cost within $80 of each other.

The voice in your head says that if you pick wrong, you are stuck with it for five years. And the better one will go on sale next week.

Here is the part nobody likes to admit. Any of the four would do the job. This is a small decision wearing a big decision's coat.

First, check the size of the coat

The book starts every choice with a two-minute sort. Can you undo it? Will it matter in a year? When is it really due?

For the laptop: undo, maybe, if the store takes returns. Matters, a little, since any of the four would work. Due, the weekend. That is small. Small gets ten minutes, not an evening.

The sort carries a STORY ONLY badge. Nobody has tested it as a method. What it does well is move your effort to where the stakes are. In the book, a bakery owner spends three evenings on a menu board and twenty minutes on a five-year lease. One sort moves the evenings to the lease.

Write the good-enough bar before you look

In the 1950s, the economist Herbert Simon argued that real people rarely pick the very best. They set a bar for what would be fine and take the first option that clears it. He called it satisficing.

The catch is timing. If you set the bar after you start looking, every shinier option nudges it up. So the book's card, Write the Good-Enough Bar First (PROMISING), has you do it before you open a tab.

1. Write what the thing is for, in one line. "Email, bills, streaming."
2. Write two or three must-haves. Not nice-to-haves. Things that rule an option out.
3. Write a price ceiling. For a choice that is not a purchase, write a time ceiling.
4. Write a search limit. "Three stores, one hour."
5. Now look. Take the first option that clears every line.
6. Stop. Close the tabs. A better deal next week does not reopen it.

The badge is honest. No experiment has tested writing the bar first. It rests on Simon's idea and on studies linking a "find the best" style with more regret.

Turn the choices that come back into rules

Some small decisions are not one-time. Dinner on Monday. Yes or no to another weekend plan. How much to spend on a coworker's birthday. Each one is minor. Together they keep reopening.

Defaults shape what people do, and strongly. In a 2003 study by Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein, 42 percent agreed to be organ donors when they had to opt in. When they had to opt out, 82 percent stayed donors. Those defaults were set by others. A personal rule is a default you set for yourself, and the book says plainly that homemade rules have not been tested.

What has been tested is the if-then form. A 2006 review by Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran pooled 94 tests of plans written as "if this happens, then do that" and found a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals.

So the Personal Rules card (PROMISING) works like this. List five small choices you made more than once last week. Circle the two that ate the most time. Write each as an if-then rule specific enough that you do not have to think: "If it's Monday, dinner is pasta." Add one allowed exception, so the rule does not snap. Check the rules once a month.

What we know about decision fatigue

You may have read that every choice drains a willpower tank, so you should save it for the big ones. The book's myth check on this is worth reading in full.

The famous evidence is a 2011 study of judges, where favorable parole rulings fell from about 65 percent to nearly zero within each session. Critics noted that prisoners without lawyers tended to go last. Then came two large, preregistered tests of the "willpower tank" idea, across 23 labs in 2016 and 36 labs in 2021. Both found close to nothing.

Neither used choice tasks, so choices are not proven harmless. But the fuel-tank model has not held up. That is why the book promises fewer reopened decisions from its rules, not saved willpower. We find that the more useful promise anyway.

Practice on lunch before the lease

Deciding is partly a skill. The book's last chapter has a 20-rung ladder of small reps: choose a dish in 60 seconds, pick tonight's show in two minutes, answer a low-stakes invite within an hour. You move up a rung when one feels easy and repeat it when one goes badly.

Where Done Deciding takes the small stuff

This is the problem Done Deciding was written for.

Small Decisions, Fast: Three Ways to Stop Giving Little Choices Big-Decision Energy has the good-enough bar, Personal Rules and a coin flip for true ties, plus the willpower and "35,000 decisions a day" myth checks.

How Big Is This, Really? Give Each Decision the Time It Actually Deserves has the Two-Minute Triage and a card for setting a decision date.

Becoming Someone Who Decides: Small Reps That Make Big Choices Easier has the 20-rep ladder and a tracker for logging each rep.

If a small choice has turned into a deadline tonight, our page on having to make a decision by tomorrow is faster.