Decision Formula

I just listened to this great podcast episode with Dharmesh Shah, the co-founder of Hubspot. In the episode, he mentions the formula system he uses to make decisions and it really clicked with the way that my mind works. Here’s roughly what he says:

I like to think systematically around decisions. The question I ask myself when faced with a decision is, Let’s say you were making Excel spreadsheet to make this decision, what would the columns be? You don’t have to decide the weights, but at least decide the factors.

If I can just identify the factors that I think should impact this decision, that’s an 80% win right there.”… You’re still not going to use the spreadsheet to make the decision, but the human making a decision has much better information they had than pre-going through that exercise.