from Hacker News

How to Take Good Decisions?

by rookie123 on 11/20/24, 5:17 PM with 20 comments

• by TheAlchemist on 11/21/24, 12:34 AM

  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.

• by nicbou on 11/22/24, 2:09 AM

  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.

• by devburman on 11/23/24, 1:54 PM

  I think a lot of people struggle with decision-making in their lives. For me personally, I tend to take time to go through all my options, think about them for a while, and make what I think is the most logical choice given the facts at hand. If I have to make a rushed decision, because we are not always given the luxury of time, I trust my gut with the facts as they are presented to me in the moment.

  Do I make mistakes, sometimes? I also beat myself up over them more than I should. The important thing though is to learn from the mistake to be better prepared next time. Here are a few tips that may be suitable for you.

  1. Always view your problem from different perspectives instead of sticking with your initial solution. ... 2. Do not make a decision just because it is the most comfortable. ... 3. If you already have your mind made up, do not just seek information that supports what you want to do. ... 4. Focus on the decision that is in front of you and your present situation.

  Some time ago I read an insightful article here however I do not remember exact URL: https://www.lifelords.com/success/

  As for books, Jocko Willink's Extreme Ownership is a good place to start. Take ownership of yourself and become the best version of yourself.

• by helph67 on 11/20/24, 9:35 PM

  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

• by keyserj on 11/21/24, 7:25 PM

  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....

• by bhu1st on 11/24/24, 3:21 AM

  I am practicing a different approach lately. Rather than spending energy on taking good decision I'd pick a decent one out of the options I have and work on it to make it good in the timeframe available for execution.

• by atmosx on 11/23/24, 5:43 PM

  Philosophy is the "love/friendship for/of wisdom". Wisdom is the art of making right decisions given a set of constrains (limited knowledge, things you don't control, etc).

• by hehehheh on 11/20/24, 10:02 PM

  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.

• by rookie123 on 11/20/24, 5:21 PM

  Bumping it up!

• by aristofun on 11/21/24, 1:00 AM

  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