Question
How do I practice recurring decision types?
Quick Answer
Over the next five days, keep a decision log. Every time you face a decision — large or small — write down what it is, then classify it by type. Do not invent categories in advance. Let them emerge from the data. By the end of five days, count how many distinct types you have logged and how many decisions fell into each type.
Most people discover that 80-90% of their decisions cluster into fewer than ten recurring types. For your top three most frequent types, write a one-sentence description of the pattern: what varies between instances, and what stays the same. This is the beginning of your decision type inventory — the raw material for building dedicated frameworks in One framework per decision type.
Common pitfall: Treating every decision as unique. When you fail to recognize recurring types, you approach each decision from scratch — re-gathering information, re-weighing criteria, re-deliberating tradeoffs that you have already resolved in structurally identical situations. This is not thoroughness. It is cognitive waste. The failure is perceptual, not analytical: you see surface differences (different people, different stakes, different context) and miss structural similarity (same decision type, same relevant variables, same optimal process). The antidote is classification — training yourself to look past the skin of a decision to its skeleton.
This practice connects to Decision Frameworks — building it as a repeatable habit compounds over time.
Learn more in these lessons
- Decision types recur predictably
Most decisions you face are variations of types you have encountered before.
Go beyond the answer
This topic is part of Think With AI — a guided sequence of 16 lessons.
After completing this path you will use AI as a thinking partner without judgment atrophy: your mental models and assumptions externalized where AI can challenge them, recurring decisions routed through explicit frameworks, decisions captured with their reasoning so both you and the AI learn from outcomes, and a clear line around the judgments that stay yours.
Start the path →