Decisions.

The framework

1. 01

   Sort before you search: the door test, then the spread.

   Not every decision deserves the same effort, and the first move is to sort rather than to start looking. Two questions do the sorting, and you have already met one: the door test from Day 64, used here to set effort rather than speed. The second is the spread — how far apart are the realistic options actually likely to be? A two-way door with closely matched candidates — the tool, the supplier, the venue, most routine hires — is satisficing territory, because the search costs more than the gap between the answers. A one-way door with genuinely divergent options earns the full search. Most of the damage comes from a mismatch of effort: a week agonising over a choice you could undo on Friday, then the permanent one made in a corridor because the week is gone.

2. 02

   Write the bar before you look at anything.

   Satisficing only works if the standard exists before the options do. Put down what good enough means in advance — the specific criteria, and the level each has to reach — then take the first candidate that clears every one and stop. The order is the protection, because the moment you start looking the standard drifts towards whatever you have just seen. You set out for a supplier who can deliver in two weeks under a stated price, meet three who can, and begin ranking them against each other instead of against the requirement — at which point the requirement has stopped deciding anything, and you are simply choosing your favourite.

3. 03

   Give the search a budget, and let it expire.

   Decide in advance how many options you will see or how long you will spend, and write it beside the bar: three quotes, two hours, Friday. Without a stated limit the search does not end, it fades — at the point of exhaustion rather than the point of sufficiency. Call the difference the one-more-option tax: every extra candidate costs real hours, adds regret about the ones you now cannot unsee, and improves the eventual choice by almost nothing once the bar is cleared. If the budget expires with nothing over the bar, that is information. Lower it deliberately or change the requirement. Do not just keep looking.

4. 04

   The full search belongs to two or three decisions a year.

   Satisficing is a way of buying attention back, and attention is only worth buying if you intend to spend it somewhere. Name the two or three decisions this year that genuinely warrant the full search — the senior hire, the long lease, the platform you will build a decade on — and protect the depth those need by refusing it everywhere else. The failure worth avoiding is not maximising; it is maximising indiscriminately, so that when the decision that mattered arrives you are out of patience and take the first plausible answer. Most people run this exactly inverted: exhaustive on the reversible, hurried on the permanent.