Decision Making

Decision Making articles on When Notes Fly, part of our Ideas coverage. Browse the 4 pieces below — newest first. Start near the top for foundational explainers, or scroll for deeper case studies and applied frameworks.

This section collects When Notes Fly's writing on Decision Making within our broader Ideas coverage. Each piece aims to give you a working understanding you can apply — the core idea, the evidence or examples behind it, and where it fits with related topics — rather than a quick definition you forget. Where a question is genuinely open or the evidence is mixed, the articles say so instead of overstating certainty. Articles link out to related reads across the site, so you can follow a thread from a single explainer into the wider topic.

How to use this page: if you are new to Decision Making, start with the most foundational explainers near the top and read them in order, since later pieces often build on the vocabulary and frameworks the earlier ones set up. If you arrived with a specific question, scan the titles and short summaries below to jump straight to the closest match, then follow its in-article links to go deeper. Each article is written to stand on its own, so you do not have to read the whole section to get value from any one piece. Taken together, the articles here trace how the ideas in Decision Making connect — what the established research agrees on, where practitioners still disagree, and how the concepts show up in everyday work and decisions. We update and expand this section as the topic develops and as new questions come up from readers, so it is worth returning to rather than treating as a fixed list.

See the full Decision Making archive, the site-wide archive, or our RSS feed. How we research and review articles: editorial standards.

Articles in Decision Making

• The Eisenhower Matrix: Prioritize Like a President — The Eisenhower matrix explained, with its actual history, its relationship to Stephen Covey's popularization, and the research on priority...
• Pareto Principle: 80/20 Rule in Real Life Examples — The 80/20 rule explained with real data and examples from business, productivity, relationships, and health.
• The 2-Minute Rule That Changed Millions of Lives — David Allen's GTD rule, James Clear's habit adaptation, BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits, and the action threshold research that explains why two minutes works.
• Essential Mental Models for Decision Making — A practical guide to essential mental models - first principles, inversion, second-order thinking, Occam's razor - and how to apply them to make...