An Executive Psychologist’s Top Six Tips for Making Better Decisions

As an executive psychologist, I am privileged to work with CEOs & VCs on optimizing their health & performance. However, as a general rule of thumb, I try to stay away from giving advice, since my stance is to not tell people how to run their lives and businesses (in fact, I’m trying to foster independence).

As a former startup CEO/executive myself, of course I’ll give advice if I think someone’s making a clear mistake or if directly asked. But most of time, my job is to give people evidence-informed frameworks for making better decisions, which they can internalize and later use in any situation. Here are my top six tips for making better decisions:

1) Decide within the same amount of time it would take to undo the decision.

Decisiveness is a competitive advantage in business and in life, and so is a sword that should be honed sharply. That being said, major decisions are not to be decided impulsively just for quickness’ sake.

In order to avoid procrastination, it’s important to set a time limit to make the decision. How long should that time period be? I recommend basing it on the chance of failure (something with 10% odds of success need to be considered more slowly than 90% odds), and how long it…