Check Whether It's Reversible

Not every decision deserves the same care. Ask whether you can undo it cheaply. If yes, decide fast and move. If no — a one-way door — slow down, because the cost of being wrong is permanent.

The technique

• Ask: if this is wrong, how hard is it to reverse? Cheap-to-undo and costly-to-undo are different decisions.
• Reversible calls: decide fast, with less information. Over-deliberating a thing you can take back is its own kind of waste.
• One-way doors — a fire, a contract you can't exit, money you can't get back, a public move: slow down and gather more before committing.
• Don't treat every decision as permanent. Most aren't, and acting like they are grinds the business to a halt.
• Don't treat a permanent one as casual either. The whole skill is matching the deliberation to the reversibility.

Do this, not that

Do: "Switching email tools? Reversible — try it, switch back if it's worse, decide in an afternoon. Signing the two-year lease on the second location? One-way door — that one gets the slow, careful look."

Don't: Spend two weeks agonizing over which $20 software to use (reversible, just pick one) while signing a major lease on a gut feeling because it felt exciting in the moment (irreversible, deserved the agonizing).

Why this works

People burn their deliberation budget backwards — they over-think the small reversible stuff and under-think the big permanent stuff, because urgency and stakes don't line up with reversibility. Sorting by whether a decision can be undone fixes that: fast on the two-way doors, slow on the one-way doors. It's the single best filter for how much a decision is worth worrying about.