Decision Making | Reading Time: 4 minutes

The Decision Matrix: How to

Prioritize What Matters
!e decisions we spend the most time on
are rarely the most important ones. Not all
decisions need the same process.
Sometimes, trying to impose the same
process on all decisions leads to di"culty
identifying which ones are most
important, bogging us down and stressing
us out.

I remember once struggling at the

intelligence agency shortly a#er I received
a promotion. I was being asked to make
too many decisions. I had no way to sort
through them to $gure out which ones
mattered, and which ones were
inconsequential.

!e situation built slowly over a period of

weeks. My employees were scared to make
decisions because their previous boss had
hung them out to dry when things went
wrong. My boss, a political high %yer, also
liked to delegate down the riskiest
decisions. As a result, I had more decisions
to make than capacity to make them. I was
working longer and longer to keep up with
the volume of decisions. Worse, I followed
the same process for all of them. I was
focusing on the most urgent decisions as
the cost of the most important decisions.

It was clear to me that I wasn’t the right

person to make all of the decisions. I
needed a quick and %exible framework to
categorize decisions into the ones I should
be making and the ones I should be
delegating. I $gured most of the urgent
decisions could be made by the team
because they were easily reversible and not
very consequential. In fact, they were only
becoming urgent because the team wasn’t
making the decisions in the $rst place.
And because I was rushing through these
decisions in an e&ort to put more time into
the important decisions, I was making
worse choices than the team would have.

As I was walking home one night, I came

up with an idea that I used from the next
day on, with pretty good success. I call it
the Decision Matrix. It’s a decision making
version of the Eisenhower Matrix, which
helps you distinguish between what’s
important and what’s urgent. It’s so simple
you can draw it on a napkin, and once you
get it, you get it.

While it won’t make the decisions for you,

it will help you quickly identify which
decisions you should focus on.

The Decision Matrix

My strategy for triaging was simple. I

separated decisions into four possibilities
based on the type of decision I was
making.

1. Irreversible and inconsequential

2. Irreversible and consequential
3. Reversible and inconsequential
4. Reversible and consequential

!e great thing about the matrix is that it

can help you quickly delegate decisions.
You do have to do a bit of mental work
before you start, such as de$ning and
communicating consequentiality and
reversibility, as well as where the blurring
lines are.

The Decision Matrix in Practice

!is matrix became a powerful ally to help

me manage time and make sure I wasn’t
bogged down in decisions where I wasn’t
the best person to decide.

I delegated both types of inconsequential

decisions. Inconsequential decisions are
the perfect training ground to develop
judgment. !is saved me a ton of time.
Before this people would come to me with
decisions that were relatively easy to make,
with fairly predictable results. !e
problem wasn’t making the decision—that
took seconds in most cases. !e problem
was the 30 minutes the person spent
presenting the decision to me. I saved at
least 5–7 hours a week by implementing
this one change.

I invested some of that time meeting with

the people making these decisions once a
week. I wanted to know what types of
decisions they made, how they thought
about them, and how the results were
going. We tracked old decisions as well, so
they could see their judgment improving
(or not).

Consequential decisions are a di&erent

beast. Reversible and consequential
decisions are my favorite. !ese
decisions trick you into thinking they are
one big important decision. In reality,
reversible and consequential decisions are
the perfect decisions to run experiments
and gather information. !e team or
individual would decide experiments we
were going to run, the results that would
indicate we were on the right path, and
who would be responsible for execution.
!ey’d present these $ndings.

Consequential and irreversible decisions

are the ones that you really need to focus
on. All of the time I saved from using this
matrix didn’t allow me to sip drinks on the
beach. Rather, I invested it in the most
important decisions, the ones I couldn’t
justify delegating. I also had another rule
that proved helpful: unless the decision
needed to be made on the spot, as some
operational decisions do, I would take a
30-minute walk $rst.

!e key to successfully employing this in

practice was to make sure everyone was on
same page with the terms of consequential
and reversible. At $rst, people checked
with me but later, as the terms became
clear, they just started deciding.

While the total volume of decisions we

made as a team didn’t change, how they
were allocated within the team changed.
I estimate that I was personally making
75% fewer decisions. But the real kicker
was that the quality of all the decisions we
made improved dramatically. People
started feeling connected to their work
again, productivity improved, and sick
days (a proxy for how engaged people
were) dropped.

Give the Decision Matrix a try—especially

if you’re bogged down and $ghting to
manage your time, it may change your
working life.

Still
Still Curious?
Curious? Read !e Eisenhower
Matrix: Master Productivity and Eliminate
Noise next.

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