We talk about making decisions as if they're binary switches.
You choose A or you choose B, and the main thing you've spent is the possibility of choosing the other option.
But anyone who has spent an afternoon researching which standing desk to buy, only to realize they've burned four hours on what amounts to a $200 purchase, knows that decisions cost us more than just the paths not taken. They consume multiple resources simultaneously, and we rarely account for all of them when we're in the thick of choosing...
Every decision extracts payment in three distinct currencies: time, focus, and optionality.
Understanding these costs separately helps explain why some choices feel exhausting even when they're objectively trivial, and why people who seem to make worse decisions sometimes end up happier than those who agonize over optimization.
The time cost seems obvious enough.
Deciding takes clock time.
You research options, compare features, read reviews, maybe make a spreadsheet. If you're buying a car, you might spend weeks on this process. If you're choosing a health insurance plan, the research phase alone could consume dozens of hours.
But the time costs compound with the stakes of the decision itself.
A $30,000 car purchase might warrant significant research time.
But the typical person spends almost as much time researching a $600 smartphone, even though the financial impact is far smaller.
Aka: we're terrible at calibrating our time investment to the actual magnitude of what we're deciding.
The arithmetic gets worse when you consider recurring decisions.
Choosing where to eat lunch every workday looks trivial in isolation, but if you spend fifteen minutes deciding each time, you've spent more than sixty hours per year just picking restaurants.
Some solve this by establishing defaults or routines.
Others treat each occurrence as a fresh decision, paying the time tax repeatedly.
Neither approach is obviously wrong, but most people drift into their pattern without consciously choosing it.
Focus costs are harder to measure // more expensive. Making decisions depletes a mental resource that doesn't replenish instantly. This is why you can spend a Saturday morning researching laptops and find yourself unable to write a clear email that afternoon, even though writing emails is normally trivial for you.
The mental motion of weighing alternatives, projecting future scenarios, and committing to a choice draws from the same well that powers your other cognitive work.
Compounding the focus cost: decisions create background radiation while they're pending. An unmade choice sits in your mental workspace, occasionally pinging you with anxiety or drawing cycles of rumination. You might think you're working on something else, but part of your brain keeps returning to the decision, running simulations, reconsidering options.
This is why solving even a minor pending decision creates a disproportionate sense of relief: you're reclaiming the cognitive territory that decision was occupying.
People who maintain long (even subconscious) lists of pending decisions wonder why they feel perpetually scattered or can't concentrate on difficult work. The answer might be that they're trying to run their mental processes while carrying too many open threads. Each unmade choice is a program running in the background, consuming resources even when you're not consciously thinking about it.
The optionality cost is the most subtle and probably the most significant. Every decision forecloses some possible futures and narrows your path forward. This is obvious with big choices like career moves or relationships, but it applies to smaller decisions too. When you schedule a meeting, you're eliminating all the other things you could do in that time slot. When you commit to learning Spanish, you're implicitly not learning Japanese, at least not simultaneously.
That optionality has diminishing returns. Having infinite options sounds appealing in theory, but in practice, it becomes paralyzing. The person who keeps all their evenings free has maximum optionality but often ends up doing nothing memorable with that freedom. Meanwhile, someone who commits to a standing weekly dinner with friends has traded optionality for consistency and depth.
Which is better?
The answer depends entirely on what you value and where you are in life.
Some decisions are reversible, which makes their optionality cost lower. You can quit a job, move to a new city, or switch insurance plans. But reversibility itself comes with costs. The mental overhead of maintaining the option to reverse a choice can be as draining as making the original decision. People who constantly re-evaluate whether they're in the right relationship or living in the right place pay ongoing focus costs for that perpetual reconsideration.
Some folks systematically undervalue one of these costs relative to the others. The person who spends weeks researching a minor purchase is overweighting time to preserve optionality. The person who makes snap judgments on important matters is preserving time and focus but might be squandering optionality. The person who agonizes endlessly over every choice without committing is burning focus to maintain optionality they'll never actually use.
The “righteous path” (if there is such a thing) probably involves a degree of conscious triage, no matter how painful.
Identify which decisions actually matter for your goals and values, then allocate your three currencies accordingly. For decisions that don't matter much, minimize time and focus costs even if that means accepting suboptimal outcomes or reduced optionality. For decisions that do matter, invest whatever combination of time, focus, and optionality the choice genuinely warrants.
But of course - most of us are bad at this triage. We spend enormous cognitive resources on decisions that barely matter while rushing through choices with genuine long-term consequences. We optimize our coffee order while sleepwalking into careers. We research consumer products exhaustively while barely examining our underlying assumptions about what makes life good.
The person who learns to make trivial decisions quickly, save their focus for what matters, and consciously choose which optionality to preserve will probably end up both more productive and more satisfied than the person who treats every choice as equally weighty.
You can't optimize everything.
Which decisions are worth the three-currency investment, and which ones are you better off resolving with a coin flip?
