One of my favorite decision-making tools, which I got from Chip and Dan Heath in their book Decisive, is their 10/10/10 method.

Loosely speaking: If you are having trouble making a big decision, select each option in turn and imagine how you will feel 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years after choosing that option.

In my experience, it works best to slow down and get into the mindset that you have selected that option and will be moving forward with it. Then work out each of the scenarios as clearly as you can. What are the likely impacts over those times? How will your life change? How much will this decision matter, for better or worse, in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years?

I have used this tool many times myself. I’ve found it most helpful for shining a bright light on things I’m worried about that really are not important.

A Gen X 10/10/10 example

An example many Gen Xers are facing right now: As your parents age, do you move to be near them, move them to be near you, or keep everyone in place? It’s a difficult decision, fraught with all kinds of emotional baggage, financial risk, and social stigma. The 10/10/10 tool might help.

Alice, for example, is a single, 51-year-old woman living in New York. Her parents are in their late 70s and living in an Atlanta suburb. They are in mostly good health, have a strong social network, and have begun pressuring Alice to move closer to them.

Alice can think through each of her options and consider how she will feel 10 minutes after deciding, 10 months after deciding, and 10 years after deciding. It’s a complicated set of feelings, taking into account impacts on her lifestyle, her parents’ health and lifestyle, her career, and countless other considerations.

In Alice’s case, in the 10 minute scenario, moving to Atlanta or moving her parents to New York were both non-starters. They felt complicated, expensive, and disruptive. Thinking about 10 months down the road, Alice still felt resistance due to upheaval, uncertainty, and expense.

Then she thought about 10 years down the road, and she imagined her parents at 87 and 89 years old. Suddenly the calculations changed. Her resistance to certain aspects of disruption and expense melted away—the easily solvable problems that had been clouding up her thinking.

With those distortions out of the way, she found she could focus in on the decision criteria that would lead her to the best choice. (For Alice, it is to keep everyone where they are, but plan for more frequent, extended visits.)

When 10/10/10 isn’t enough scenarios

I love the 10/10/10 tool because it can shake loose the fears that may be limiting your imagination, and it can highlight which options you were considering that are, in fact, patently bad choices. We often get so stuck in the immediate impacts of any decision that we lose sight of the bigger picture.

Last week, I jokingly added a new dimension to this tool for one of my clients.

As we talked through the decision she was trying to make, she halfheartedly brought up 10/10/10. We’d used it before to good effect, but this time she brought it up because we both knew (but had not said out loud) that the decision she was fixated on really wouldn’t matter much in the long run. It was still a hard choice, and important in the short term, but in the long run? Everything would even out one way or another.

So, after she brought up 10/10/10, I suggested, “Maybe we should be talking about 10/10/10/100? As in, 100 years from now, what you choose today won’t matter one bit.”

And with that, it became clear to both of us that which choice she made was immaterial. She just had to make a choice and stop traversing decision circles.

Expanding perspective

It was a useful bit of humor in that moment, but I think it is a powerful addition to the 10/10/10 model. Sometimes the perspective you need is the one we all ignore—how will this really matter after I’m dead?

You get to decide that for yourself. Whether you believe in an afterlife or reincarnation or nothing at all or something else entirely, imagining the world after you’ve left it can be both a humbling and liberating exercise.

And, in many cases, it can give you a completely different perspective on that hard decision you’re trying to make.

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