How I Make Decisions Fast (And Why Speed Matters)

Key Points

Most business decisions are reversible—you can course-correct. Decide fast on these and optimize later.
The 70% rule: If you have 70% of the information you want, decide now. The last 30% rarely justifies the wait.
Reserve slow decision-making for irreversible choices (hiring, partnerships, legal) and reduce daily decision fatigue through routines and delegation.

I make a lot of decisions. Every single day. Running multiple businesses means constant judgment calls—on strategy, hiring, product features, partnerships, spending, and a thousand smaller things that most people never notice. I’ve learned that speed is one of my biggest competitive advantages. Not recklessness, but speed.

Most founders, employees, and business leaders are too slow at making decisions. They gather more data. They hold another meeting. They sleep on it. Meanwhile, their competitors shipped, learned what worked, and moved on. By the time the slow decision-maker acts, they’re already playing catch-up.

The problem isn’t that people make bad decisions. It’s that they make the same decision over and over, agonizing each time, when they should have decided once and moved forward.

Type 1 vs. Type 2

Jeff Bezos popularized this framework, and it changed how I think about decisions. He splits decisions into two categories.

Type 1 decisions are irreversible. You walk through a door and it closes behind you. The cost of being wrong is high. These decisions deserve time, analysis, and caution. You don’t rush hiring your co-founder. You don’t rush signing a five-year lease. You don’t rush legal agreements or partnerships with people you don’t trust. These are one-way doors, and you should treat them seriously.

Type 2 decisions are reversible. You can always walk back through, or try a different path. Most decisions in business are Type 2, even though we treat them like Type 1. You choose a software tool—and if it doesn’t work, you switch. You launch a feature—and if nobody uses it, you remove it. You hire someone for a role—and if it’s not the right fit, you find someone else. You decide on a pricing model—and if your customers hate it, you change it.

The cost of treating a Type 2 decision like a Type 1 is enormous. You lose speed, momentum, and learning. You miss the window to respond to market changes. You waste cycles on analysis paralysis.

I’ve run the numbers in my own businesses. The harm from delayed decisions is almost always worse than the harm from wrong decisions.

The Cost of Waiting

Here’s something nobody talks about: the cost of indecision. While you’re deliberating, your competitor shipped. While you’re analyzing, the market shifted. While you’re waiting for consensus, your team’s energy faded. Those costs are real, they stack up, and they’re almost invisible.

I saw this clearly at Rotate. We were deciding between two product approaches for a client feature. Both had merit. I was uncertain, so I wanted more time. My team kept shipping other things. A week passed. Two weeks. Then a client asked for something adjacent, and suddenly the original question felt less important. We’d lost momentum and context. When we finally decided, we’d also lost the emotional energy to execute well.

The better move? Decide in a day. Ship something. See what happens. Adjust based on reality, not assumptions.

Annie Duke, the professional poker player and author of “Thinking in Bets,” describes this brilliantly. In poker, you never have perfect information. You have to decide with incomplete data, accept that sometimes you’ll lose despite making the right decision, and focus on the quality of your decision-making process—not the outcome of any single hand. Business is the same.

The 70% Rule

If you have 70% of the information you want, decide. This is my north star for Type 2 decisions.

The last 30% almost never justifies the wait. You’ll spend two weeks analyzing to get that last 30%, and by then, the decision is already outdated. You’ve also paid a hidden cost: you couldn’t move forward, your team couldn’t move forward, and opportunities passed you by.

The 70% rule gives you permission to be comfortable with incomplete information. It forces you to actually ship.

This assumes you’re in a reversible decision. For Type 1 decisions—hiring a full-time employee, signing a major contract, making a big capital investment—shoot for 90%. But be honest about which category you’re in.

When to Go Slow

Not all decisions should be fast. Some absolutely deserve your best, slowest thinking.

Hiring. Bringing someone onto your team is a Type 1 decision disguised as reversible. Sure, you can fire someone, but the culture damage, the lost time, the disrupted momentum—those costs are massive. I interview slowly, check references deeply, and make sure we’re aligned on values and vision. This is where you don’t rush.

Partnerships. Same logic. Choosing who to partner with affects everything downstream. This deserves deliberation.

Legal agreements. Don’t speed through contracts. Get a lawyer. Read carefully. Negotiate the terms you actually want, not the ones that are convenient.

Anything involving other people’s money. If you’re asking someone to invest or commit capital, you owe them a thoughtful decision. This isn’t reckless territory.

The trick is to be selective about which decisions deserve slow thinking. Most founders apply their “slow mode” to everything, which is why they’re slow at everything. Be intentional: type 1 gets the time, type 2 gets the speed.

Reduce Decision Load

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: decision fatigue is real, and every decision you make drains the same mental resource. If you make 500 small decisions before noon, you’ll make worse decisions at 2 PM.

The best way to be fast at important decisions is to eliminate trivial ones.

I use routines obsessively. Same breakfast. Same gym time. Same schedule for deep work. I’ve set defaults for everything: how I handle email, how I structure my day, which meetings are standing and which are by request. I’ve delegated an enormous amount of decision-making to my team. If they can decide it, they do. I only get looped in on bigger calls.

By the time I reach the decisions that matter, I’ve already spent less mental energy. I’m sharper. I can think more clearly.

This is why my daily routine is so rigid. It’s not because I’m obsessive (okay, maybe a little). It’s because I’m protecting my decision-making capacity for the choices that actually move the needle.

My Framework

When I hit a decision, I run through three questions:

Is this reversible? If yes, apply the 70% rule and move. If no, slow down and think harder.
What’s the cost of being wrong? If the downside is manageable, bias toward speed. If the downside is catastrophic, take more time.
What’s the cost of waiting? This is the question most people skip. If waiting costs you speed-to-market, team momentum, or competitive position, waiting is expensive. Sometimes the cost of waiting is higher than the cost of being wrong.

Those three questions handle most decisions. They force me out of analysis paralysis and into a clear decision tree.

Real Examples

At The Points Party, we were deciding whether to build a mobile app. We had partial data suggesting it could work. It wasn’t a Type 1 decision—we could always sunset it if it failed. So I decided at 70% confidence. We shipped something basic. Turns out, our users didn’t want an app—they wanted better email notifications. We killed the app, built the notifications, and learned that in three weeks instead of three months.

If I’d waited for perfect certainty, we’d have built the wrong thing and felt great about it.

On the flip side, I once rushed into a partnership without vetting the person properly. I told myself it was reversible. It wasn’t. The partnership damaged a relationship I valued, created confusion with clients, and cost me weeks of cleanup. That was a Type 1 decision I treated as Type 2, and I paid for it.

Learning these distinctions has made me faster and better at business. I decide quickly on product features, hiring junior roles, vendor tools, and marketing experiments. I’m cautious on co-founder relationships, major hires, and legal commitments. And I’m rigorous about removing trivial decisions from my life so I can be sharp when it matters.

The world doesn’t reward people for careful deliberation. It rewards people who decide, ship, learn, and iterate. Most of the time, that’s me.

Further reading: Check out how I approach this across my businesses in How I Decide What to Build and why shipping imperfect work matters in Ship It Ugly. If you’re running a business, you might also find my thoughts on Integrators Guide to Running a Business relevant to how decisions flow through your organization.