Remember the old trick? Wait a day before sending an angry message and you’ll find you may not want to send that message at all. It’s a form of decision deference and it’s sensible. So why do we not adopt it as a practice when making other, bigger decisions about our life?

Example. I, like everyone else, have a finite amount of time, energy and attention to distribute down the various avenues of my life. Thus, how I deploy these scarce resources has a big impact on the quality of my life now and in the future. So it makes sense for me to consider the use of these resources whilst I’m in an optimal state, correct?

It never happens that way, though. I’ll be coming off a bad night’s sleep, a few day’s worth of shitty food and some anxiety-inducing news and I’ll decide to make decisions about discontinuing one project and prioritising another. Is that sensible? No. It would be more practical to schedule important decisions like this for times when I am operating at maximum capacity.

Decision scheduling is a more advanced variant of decision deference. Instead of waiting till later to make a highly consequential decision, I’m better off waiting till optimum. That means having the presence of mind to realise when I’m about to make decisions in a sub-optimal state and the patience to endure until an opportunity for optimal-state decision making comes around.