Not all decisions require the same amount of time to think through, but some high impact decisions warrant your time, energy, and effort to make valuable decisions.
To help understand how much energy you should put into a decision think about the impact it will have and the ease in which you can change it.
If the decision will have wide reaching impact and cannot be easily changed do not make the decision on the spot in real time. Take time. Take a walk, create a mind map, threat model, or get outside perspective. Try to optimize for a wide range of outcomes in this process.
If the decision doesn’t have large impact or can be changed easily don’t get bogged down in the minutiae. The time you spend threat modeling low impact decisions may be better spent through experimentation. Be mindful of where your decisions lie and the unintended impact they may have, but don’t pre-optimize.
Triaging your decisions before you make them so you can know when to take time is a skill you will develop by reviewing your last decisions. Were you accurate with the time you spent making your last decisions?
In the beginning you may default to giving decisions more time than you may originally think, then refine later.
Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay