Categorize weekly decisions as routine or novel — build frameworks for your top 5 routine decisions to eliminate repeated deliberation

Why This Is a Rule

Knowledge workers make hundreds of decisions per week. Most are routine — the same type of decision recurring with minor variations. "Should I attend this meeting?" "How should I respond to this email?" "What should I work on next?" Each routine decision, deliberated fresh, consumes 2-10 minutes of cognitive resources. Five routine decisions per day × 5 minutes × 5 days = over 2 hours of weekly deliberation on decisions that could be pre-resolved with simple frameworks.

The routine/novel classification is the key diagnostic. Routine decisions have a stable correct answer or a simple heuristic that produces consistently good results: "Attend meetings only if I'm on the agenda or need information" (default rule). "Respond to emails that require <2 min; batch the rest for 4 PM" (two-option heuristic). Novel decisions genuinely require fresh thinking — they're unique enough that no framework would apply.

The five-framework constraint prevents over-engineering. You don't need to automate every routine decision — just the five highest-frequency ones. This captures the Pareto principle: the top 5 routine decisions probably account for 50%+ of your weekly deliberation on automatable choices.

When This Fires

• During weekly reviews when auditing how you spent decision-making energy
• When you feel decision fatigue despite not making "big" decisions — the cause is usually high-volume routine decisions
• When building personal productivity systems for cognitive offloading (Only automate decisions that are frequent, stable, and low-stakes — all three must hold or automation introduces risk)
• At the start of any role change, new project, or workflow redesign

Common Failure Mode

Treating all decisions as novel: "Every meeting invitation is different." The meeting topic varies, but the decision structure is the same: does this meeting require my presence? A simple framework ("attend if I'm on the agenda, contributing, or need information from the meeting; decline otherwise") handles 90% of meeting decisions without deliberation.

The Protocol

(1) At the end of one work week, list every decision you remember making. (2) Classify each as routine (you've made a similar decision before and the optimal approach is predictable) or novel (genuinely unique, requiring fresh analysis). (3) For routine decisions, rank by frequency. Which ones recur most often? (4) For the top 5 highest-frequency routine decisions, draft a simple framework: Default answer: "Unless exception X, always do Y." Two-option heuristic: "If A, do X; if B, do Y." Pre-commitment rule: "I have pre-decided that in situation X, I always do Y" (Design pre-commitments when calm to constrain behavior when stressed — never make rules in hot states). (5) Implement all five within one week. The frameworks should each take <5 minutes to design and save multiples of that in avoided deliberation every week.