3 Decision Making Frameworks

In an age of infinite leverage, judgment is a superpower. That’s nival Ravikant. We talk a lot about judgment and decision making as one of the most important skills that you can have as an entrepreneur or just as an individual in this new modern world where the power of your decisions could have such enormous upside potential. But one of the difficulties is how do you actually develop as a good decision maker? Like, how do you develop that ability as having good judgment? Typically, we would say that it just takes time. Like, you need to have a lot of time and a lot of experience. And with time and wisdom, experience comes wisdom. Right. But how can we fast track that? How can we take a more active role in developing our decision making powers? Well, I want to share with you today three frameworks or three ideas that you can use when you’re working through a decision, whether big or small.

And by implementing these frameworks on a consistent basis, you’ll start to see, like, you’re systematically making better decisions, because now you actually have a process through which you think through your decisions. And just that right there sets you so far ahead and beyond most people who don’t really have a formula, a way of processing big, important decisions. So let’s take it from the top. Number one is the ice framework. This is ice. This is a way of rank ordering and prioritizing tasks and working through what should you be working on? Because that’s one of the most important questions you got to answer at any given moment with your life, is like, what should I be working on right now? What should I be spending my time on? You don’t have so much time that you can afford to be wasting it. So getting really clear what’s the most important stuff, and this is a nice little handy dandy framework for doing that. So ice stands for impact, confidence, and ease.

The way this works is you list out everything that’s on your plate, the things that you’re working through right now, and you rank order them based off of how much impact they would have, how much confidence you have in your ability to execute it, and how easy it would be to execute it. Now, the way I was taught this framework was from Tom Billu a number of years ago, and he would just rank them all on a scale of one to ten, and then he would just look at whatever has the highest number and he would go tackle that. So, for instance, writing a book, very impactful. That’s a number. Ten on impact, confidence. I’ve written a number of books, so maybe an eight for ease. That’s like a two. So grand total.
We have a score of 20. My problem with this system, though, is that’s writing a book, and that’s very impactful. We know that. And I have high confidence. But because it’s not an easy thing to do, it brings the whole score down artificially. Well, you compare that to something else, like make a YouTube video. YouTube video maybe is a nine on impact, and maybe it’s a seven on confidence. Right? But maybe it’s a six or a seven on ease.
And therefore, I just am going to do some math here in public. So bear with me. That would be nine, let’s say, for the impact. Let’s say the confidence was seven. So now that we’re at 16, and let’s say we said six or seven for the confidence, now we are at about 23, right. So we’re above writing a book. So I should probably work on the video rather than working on the book. But one of those isn’t as impactful as the other one, and so are we actually doing the more important thing.
So I took Tom’s scale of, instead of ranking everything on one to ten, what I did was something a little bit different. I started ranking everything, impact on a scale of one to 20, confidence on a scale of one to ten, and then ease on a scale of one to five, because I don’t think ease should play, should have an equal role in your decision making calculus as impact. So I think impact is far more important than how easy a thing is, because the things that are typically the most impactful are typically going to be difficult. So rank order whatever you’re working through, and you’ll start to notice some trends, like, okay, these things, the more impactful ones. That’s probably what you should be spending your time and energy on, right? So that’s one system, the ice method. And you can go to. Where can you get this? You can go to anthonyvacino.com millionaire, and you can download my three step millionaire productivity system. In there, I give some more examples about the ice system and how you can apply it.
So you can go download that completely free. All right. Second system or second framework for thinking through decisions is the idea of revolving doors. I learned from Jeff Bezos. I read one of his shareholderholder letters, and that’s where I learned he’d have sit me down and tell me this. Just the idea that some decisions are like walking through a revolving door, which means they can easily be reversed, whereas some decisions, it’s a one way door, and you can’t go back once you go through that door, you can’t come back out. And it’s really helpful then to delineate what are those decisions in your life that are a revolving door versus just a one way door? The one way door is you want to take more time and be considerate with. If you can’t reverse the decision, you’re going to want to take a little bit more time with that decision, assuming that it’s an important decision.
If it’s important and non reversible, then you got to take your time with it. But if it’s not important and it’s reversible, then don’t worry about it. You need to prioritize the speed of decision in that situation. So just asking yourself, is this an important decision that I can unwind, or is this an important decision that only has a one way door? And a lot of times the decisions that we think are one way doors are actually revolving doors. We’d be better served instead of just trying to go through all the mental hoops of just making the decision quickly and moving on. So that’s number two. The third system for making decisions and working through your tasks and prioritizing things in your life is the Eisenhower matrix. Now, the Eisenhower matrix is just a simple way of graphing out the activities that you need to do in your life.
So if we were to graph activities on a y axis of importance and an x axis of urgency, then what you would arrive at, and this, I know this is hard to visualize, perhaps in an audio format, but you. The vertical line is important. Things that are important, the more important they are, the higher up they are on the y axis. And things that are on the horizontal line, the x axis, they are urgent. So the further along that, the more urgent they are. So what this creates then, is the things that are in the very top right corner of this graph are things that are both urgent and important. That’s what we call quadrant one and quadrant one task I call Migs, or the most important goals. If you go to the left of your migs or your quadrant one, you’re left in this quadrant two, which are activities that are important but not necessarily very urgent.
And these activities I refer to as wigs, they’re wildly important goals. And we’ll put a pin in this. We’ll come back to mildly and wildly important goals here in just a second because these are the ones that we want to focus our time and energy on. But let’s say we go below this line now to the bottom right corner, so directly underneath quadrant one, we have quadrant three. These tasks are urgent, but they’re not terribly important. Okay. So these are things like emails, walking the dog, doing grocery shopping, those things that are like, they’re urgent, you got to do them. Life doesn’t move on without them, but they’re not terribly important.
And then activities that are to the left of even that, they’re activities that are falling in quadrant four, which is directly below quadrant two. So these are activities that are not important and they’re not urgent, and therefore we should just delete those entirely. Right now. The way to think through these is that we want to delete quadrant four activities that are not important and not urgent. We want to delegate quadrant three activities that are urgent but not important, and we want to then schedule when we’re going to do our quadrant two activities. See, quadrant one, you don’t really need to worry about all that often because things that are both important and urgent, they have a way of getting done. Like, you know, you have your deadline, and so you’re probably going to get that thing done. You don’t need to overly worry about those.
Generally, it’s the things that are wildly important. The things that are important but not necessarily urgent because they don’t have a timeline associated with them right now or the timeline is so long. Those are the things that we tend to put off, and we send a sacrifice for the expense of quadrant three and quadrant four activities until that quadrant two activity, that wildly important goal, suddenly gets promoted to most important to now, it’s urgent and important. We don’t want that, though, because then the work that we can put towards that activity is usually not the highest quality that it could have been if we had just been slowly working away at it over time. So our quadrant two activities are the ones that I like to proactively schedule into my life. And by doing that, you’re making sure that those activities that are most important are getting the attention that they deserve and not just as a consequence of them becoming urgent. So that is the Eisenhower matrix. I’ve done a bunch of videos on that.

It’s a very, very helpful framework that we use with our teams to rank, order and prioritize what are we running at collectively at any given moment. So those are three decision making frameworks. Hopefully, one of these gives you something to noodle on, chew on, and hopefully go out there and make some better decisions. So thanks as always for being here. We’ll catch you in the next episode, but until then, stay hyper focused, my friend. Bye.