Most advice about making better decisions assumes the problem sits right at the moment of choosing, and that if you can just think clearly enough while the options are in front of you, you’ll choose well. It’s a comforting assumption, because it puts the whole thing under your control exactly when you feel you need control. It’s also largely wrong, and research on judgment has been fairly consistent about why.
By the time someone is weighing two job offers or three apartments, much of what will determine how they feel about the choice a year later has already been settled, often before they realized they were deciding anything. People who look back on their choices without much regret usually aren’t better at analysis than everyone else.
They’re doing something earlier than the decision, or deliberately not doing something at all, and from the outside both of those look like less care rather than more.
Habit 1: They Decide What Matters Before They Know What’s Available
The first habit is to work out what a good outcome would actually look like before any specific option is on the table.
This matters because of motivated reasoning, the well-documented tendency for reasoning to serve a conclusion you’ve already arrived at rather than lead you to one, as a 2025 study published in Collabra: Psychology lays out.
Once you have a favorite, your standards start quietly reorganizing themselves around it. The apartment with the beautiful light makes the long commute seem like something you’d get used to, and the candidate who interviewed warmly makes the missing experience look like something that can be taught. Nobody experiences this as bending the criteria. It feels like noticing what really counts.
There’s also a difference in how you think about something depending on how close it is. One long-studied idea in psychology, construal level theory, suggests that psychological distance can shift attention toward purpose and values, while proximity pulls it toward features and logistics — though the effect has proven smaller and less consistent than earlier research implied.
Deciding your criteria early still captures something real: the version of you that can better see why the choice matters, before the version of you that’s about to be very impressed by a kitchen takes over.
A useful extension of this is the premortem, an approach associated with the researcher Gary Klein, where you imagine it’s a year from now and the decision went badly, then explain how that happened.
When studied with real project teams, a 2023 study published in Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting found the exercise reliably produced a long, concrete list of specific risks and fixes — a notably high yield for a technique that takes minutes. Asking what could go wrong tends to produce vague, dutiful answers, while assuming something already went wrong tends to produce specific ones.
Habit 2: They Let Themselves Choose Badly When It Doesn’t Matter
The second habit is stranger, which is that people who rarely regret their decisions make a lot of their decisions carelessly, and they do it on purpose.
Decision researchers distinguish between maximizing, which means searching for the best available option, and satisficing, which means setting a threshold and taking the first thing that clears it.
The consistent and slightly deflating finding, most closely associated with Barry Schwartz’s work on choice, is that maximizers tend to end up with marginally better outcomes on paper while reporting more regret and less satisfaction with what they chose.
A 2025 study published in Spanish Journal of Marketing – ESIC, synthesizing nearly a hundred studies on the subject, confirms the pattern has held up consistently since.
Some of that comes from the searching itself. Every option you seriously consider and then reject doesn’t disappear when you choose. It stays available as a comparison, so the more thoroughly you shop, the more alternative versions of your life you have on hand to measure the real one against.
The rest is a matter of capacity. Deliberation is limited, and someone who spends it on the restaurant, the laptop and the paint color has less of it available for the handful of decisions that genuinely repay the effort. Choosing to be sloppy about lunch isn’t a lapse in standards, it’s a way of protecting attention for where it counts. The point isn’t that care never helps, but that most people apply it evenly across decisions that don’t deserve equal amounts of it.
