Reversible decision

A reversible decision is one you can walk back without much cost: a price you can change next month, a tool you can stop paying for, a format you can drop after four attempts. An irreversible one cannot be undone at any sensible price — a co-founder agreement, a five-year lease, a public promise to a customer.

The useful move is sorting decisions into the two buckets before deciding anything, because they deserve opposite handling. Reversible ones should be made fast, on partial information, by whoever is closest to the work — the cost of being wrong is one undo, and the cost of deliberating is weeks of not knowing. Irreversible ones deserve the slow version: more information, more opinions, a night's delay.

The common failure is applying the wrong speed to each. Most people deliberate for three weeks over a reversible choice and sign an irreversible one in an afternoon because it arrived with momentum behind it. The sorting question is one line: if this turns out wrong in three months, what does undoing it cost?

Worked: two decisions in the same week. Changing the pricing page — reversible, one hour of work to revert, so ship it on Tuesday and read the data. Signing a two-year office lease — irreversible, roughly $60,000 of exposure, so it earns the three weeks the pricing page was taking.