The 24-hour rule for big decisions

The decision you make at 9am Monday is almost never the same one you'd make at 9am Tuesday.

This sounds like indecision. It isn't. It's calibration.

Big decisions are usually made under emotional load. You're frustrated. You're excited. You just got the email. The market just moved. You're tired. You're charged up.

In any of those states, the decision you make is more about the state than about the decision.

The 24-hour rule: for any decision that can wait a day, wait a day. Make the call again on day two, with twenty-four hours of distance from whatever provoked it.

If the answer is the same, it was the right call.

If the answer is different, the original call was state-noise.

I keep this rule for hires, fires, big spends, large product changes, public statements I'm tempted to make in anger, contracts with new clauses, and any quit-thoughts.

Three things I've noticed after years of this:

Most decisions don't actually need to be made today. The urgency is usually projected. The decision-feeling is mostly the brain wanting to discharge the tension.

The 24-hour decision is almost always smaller in scope than the 9am decision. Sleep softens the swing. The next-day version is more proportional.

The decisions I'm most embarrassed about, in retrospect, are the ones I made the same hour I was provoked.

This costs almost nothing. A day. The cost of the missed urgency, in the rare cases where there was actual urgency, is much less than the cost of one bad reactive call.

Wait the day. Make the better decision.