Module 5 · Making decisions · Lesson 2 of 10

One-way doors and two-way doors

Most decisions can be undone. Knowing which can’t tells you where to slow down.

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The idea

Decisions differ in how easily they can be undone. Some are like doors you can walk back through: trying a new hobby, a new routine, a short course, a different way of working. Others are like doors that lock behind you, or nearly: having a child, selling a family home, a major surgery, signing a long contract.

This difference should set your speed. Reversible decisions can usually be made quickly, because the cost of being wrong is small — you learn and walk back. Irreversible ones deserve care, time and outside views. A common mistake is to spend weeks agonising over reversible choices and rush irreversible ones.

A related distinction is between urgent and important. Urgent things demand attention now; important things matter for your life. Many important decisions are never urgent — so they are postponed forever while urgent, unimportant ones fill the days.

Why it matters

Matching your care to how reversible a decision is saves enormous time and worry, and keeps your careful thinking for the few choices that really need it. Separating urgent from important stops the important ones from being quietly crowded out.

See it happen

Marcus spends three weeks researching which note-taking app to use, while putting off a conversation with his landlord about a lease renewal that is due next month.

The first read

He wants to choose the app well so he never has to switch again, and the lease conversation feels awkward, so it keeps slipping.

With this idea

He sees the app choice is easy to reverse and picks one in ten minutes. The lease is harder to reverse and time-sensitive, so he books the conversation for Monday and prepares his questions carefully.

What changed

He matched his care to how reversible each decision was and to what was genuinely important.

Easy to get wrong

• Treating every decision as permanent. Most are more reversible than they feel in the moment.
• Treating a hard-to-reverse decision as casual because everyone else seems to make it quickly.

Different perspectives

Reasonable people disagree here. None of these is presented as the final word.

Move fast on reversible choices

The “two-way door” idea holds that most decisions can be undone, so speed and learning by trying are worth more than long analysis.

Reversible is not always cheap

Critics note that “reversible” decisions still cost time, money and trust to undo, and that people often underestimate how hard it is to walk back through a door once other people depend on the choice.

What this rests on

Practical wisdom. A widely used way of working. Useful to try — not a scientific law.

• Jeff Bezos — one-way and two-way doors (2015 shareholder letter) — A business shorthand: decisions that are hard to reverse deserve slow care; most decisions can be reversed and should be made quickly.
• The urgent–important matrix (associated with Eisenhower; popularised by Stephen Covey, 1989) — Sorting tasks by whether they are urgent and whether they are important, so important-but-not-urgent work is not always crowded out.

Try it: Sort your open decisions

1. List every decision currently on your mind, big or small.
2. Mark each: easy to reverse, hard to reverse.
3. Mark each: urgent, important, both or neither.
4. Make one easy-to-reverse decision now. Put one important, hard-to-reverse one on your schedule to think about properly.

Reflect

• Which reversible decision have you been treating as if it were permanent?
• Which important decision keeps losing to urgent things?

Use it in the coming days

Make two small reversible decisions today without further research, and book time this week for one important one.

Where to do it: My Schedule

Important decisions that are never urgent need a time on the schedule, or they wait forever.