How to Take Good Decisions?

Hey everyone! I'm trying to get better at decision-making, both at work and in everyday life. Do you have any favorite books, articles, or courses that really helped you make better choices? I'd love any recommendations—whether it's practical tips, interesting frameworks, or just great reads. Thanks in advance!

Here you go ! https://fs.blog/

It's a very good blog - albeit getting a bit too much 'commercialized' in the last years. The guy also wrote a book, which I found pretty good: https://fs.blog/clear/

That being said, you can read all this stuff, but more importantly - you need to apply it. This is the hard part.

1 day agoby TheAlchemist

I find that just stopping to think helps a lot. People rarely make time for thinking things through. You can’t organise everything within the 10 minutes of peace you get in the shower.

I will often go for a walk or sit in a cafe with a sheet of paper and just think about the problem. I try to define the problem properly before I even start thinking about solutions.

For trickier problems, you just need time. I go on a long bike ride and let ideas simmer until they break down into something simpler and more manageable. I get my best work done after my weeks-long hikes and rides.

Above all, know thyself. Having some awareness of your own biases and irrationality helps you correct the course. Knowing what you like, where you tend to get stuck and what you suck at helps a lot.

13 hours agoby nicbou

I'm a big fan of the decision matrix, where you boil down a decision into options and criteria, then can score how important each criterion is and how well each option fulfills the criterion. I think it helps provide a way to make your intuitions a little more concrete, and to start reasoning about them.

Here's a very simple decision matrix web app https://www.ruminate.io/.

I'm also building a tool for analyzing problems, which includes functionality for a decision matrix: https://ameliorate.app/. Most of it centers around clarifying causes and effects of problems/solutions, which can also help you grasp a situation. Here's an example of a decision I've made with the tool for picking which ORM to use for building the tool itself: https://ameliorate.app/examples/ORM?view=Tradeoffs+scored+as....

20 hours agoby keyserj

Never forget `Pareto', you will find it applies to most of life. Quote> The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the "vital few"). <End quote.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

1 day agoby helph67

For teamwork there are frameworks like DACI https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook/plays/daci that, along with a low ego, blameless, professional culture can end up helping to make well informed decisions. It can handle a NoSQL vs. Relational type decision as a breeze! The whole team (s) should be involved. It beats the classic talking shop get everyone in a room and someone starts rambling, and you try to solve every itch anyone can think of.

I understand the resistance of developers to such frameworks. Maybe Scrum misuse killed all enthusiasm.

Both inside and outside of work: 5 whys is good.

Think of 1 and 2 way doors. If the decision is reversible it is almost an experiment. Travel for 4 weeks or 12 weeks? Doesn't matter as you can fly home at any point.

Even buying a house is fairly reversible although selling immediately will be costly.

Having children is a one way door. Having dogs or cats is really too (or should be considered as)

Quitting a job may be 1 or 2 way. If you are high level at Google it may be impossible to get back to something like that soon. If you have a regular web dev job you can probably get something like that again if you decide to take time to do something else.

1 day agoby hehehheh

Bumping it up!

1 day agoby rookie123

There isn’t such a generic skill as “decision making”.

Sorry to disappoint but quality of your decisions grow only proportional to your expertise in some area.

There are adjacent and similar areas, so by getting better at one you improve your decision making in others as well.

But any book that tries to sell you generic “decision making” skill is a piece of garbage.

This is how skills work fundamentally.

Meta-skills cannot be learned, can’t be trained. This is why they are meta

1 day agoby aristofun