Most people rank decisions by how hard they are: how long they take to think through, whether the data is complete, whether anyone will review them afterwards.

That ranking sends attention to systematically the wrong place.

Two kinds of decision

Some decisions can be walked back, and the cost is wasted time. Others cannot, and the cost is three years of taking the long way round.

Switching a supplier, changing a price, shipping a feature — mostly reversible. Get it wrong and you can undo it inside two months, having learned things you could only learn by doing it.

Choosing a co-founder, signing a three-year lease, deciding which market the company serves — irreversible. Not literally unchangeable, but expensive enough to change that the cost eats every benefit you were chasing.

The awkward part is that difficulty and reversibility are frequently inverted.

Switching suppliers is a hassle: quotes, audits, renegotiated contracts, several rounds of meetings. Choosing a co-founder often happens over one dinner, because the conversation flowed.

So we spend our heaviest analysis on the reversible things and our lightest on the irreversible ones.

Reversible decisions: deliberation is the cost

If a decision can be undone within two months, three more meetings will usually yield less information than two weeks of simply doing it.

The right approach is move fast, and write down exactly what you are betting on. The second half matters more. Without a record of your reasoning, being wrong only teaches you “that road was blocked” — not “which of my assumptions was false”. The first does not compound. The second does.

In practice I write three lines: what I am betting, what I expect to see in two months, and what observation would mean I was wrong.

Irreversible decisions: slow the commitment, not the thinking

Irreversible decisions deserve to be slowed down, but many people slow the wrong thing. They spend longer thinking while having already quietly committed.

What actually helps is pushing back the moment of commitment, and cutting the irreversible part into reversible pieces.

• A three-year lease can start as six months with a renewal option.
• A co-founder can first be a collaborator on one genuinely stressful project.
• A new market can be entered with the smallest possible offering for one quarter.

Each of these costs a premium. The premium buys information, and it is usually cheap.

What is worth paying for is not a better decision. It is deciding later.

One practical check

Before committing, ask: if this turns out to be wrong in six months, what does it cost in money and time to walk back?

If the answer is “two months and not much money”, stop meeting about it and go.

If the answer is “you cannot walk back”, then today’s job is not to decide. It is to find a way to make the decision reversible.