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Decisions

Decisions randomizers

What to eat, what to watch, what to do next.

Fourteen tools for the decisions that are genuinely not worth the time they consume — what to eat, what to watch, whether to do the thing at all. The value is not that a coin knows better than you do; it is that a small, low-stakes decision stops occupying a whole evening.

Decisions

When to hand a decision to chance

Randomising is the right move when the options are close enough in value that the cost of deliberating exceeds the difference between them. Two restaurants you would both enjoy, four films with similar ratings, a workout you will do either way — a draw settles it in a second and the outcome is fine by construction.

It is the wrong move when the options genuinely differ in consequence. A tool that picks a city to move to is a way of generating a shortlist to research, not a way of skipping the research.

The useful side effect

Handing a decision to a coin often tells you what you wanted. The moment of disappointment when it lands wrong is information you did not have while you were weighing it up, and it is free. Nothing obliges you to accept the result — although a group that agreed in advance to accept it will save itself a second argument.

Filter first, then draw

A random pick across everything is rarely what anyone wants. Narrow to the options you would actually accept — open now, on a service you have, within budget — and randomise over that shortlist. A draw from a bad pool returns a bad answer entirely correctly.

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