10 / 10 / 10

When to use it

Use it when a decision is loaded with an immediate emotion — anger, embarrassment, infatuation, panic — and you suspect that feeling won't still be running the show a year from now, things like a heated reply, quitting on a bad week, or a purchase that promises to fix how you feel today.

When it's the wrong tool

It's the wrong tool for decisions with no real emotional charge, like picking a vendor or a paint color, where imagining three future selves is just theater around a choice that was never emotional to begin with. It also struggles with decisions that are irreversible and high-stakes in ways no amount of imagined hindsight can substitute for real information — you can't 10/10/10 your way past not knowing a key fact.

An example

After a tense meeting, someone drafts a sharp email resigning on the spot. In 10 minutes, sending it would feel great — vindicating, final. In 10 months, they'd likely be job-hunting under worse terms than if they'd left on notice. In 10 years, the meeting itself won't be memorable at all, but the reference-check awkwardness might be. Laid out together, the 10-minute feeling is clearly the least important vote in the room.

How it works

1. Write down the decision you're facing.
2. Write how you expect to feel about it in 10 minutes.
3. Write how you expect to feel about it in 10 months, then 10 years.
4. Compare the three — and weight the later ones more than the first.

The tool below is free and needs no account. Nothing you type leaves your browser unless you save it.

Prefer to train the thinking behind these instead of reaching for a tool each time? The frameworks are explained free, and one drill takes about a minute.