Decisionize: Simplify decision making in 3 easy steps

Great product , I don't think I have seen anything like this on !Product Hunt 4.0 . But I have to say this by a personal experience : "sometimes" life isn't that easy and options cannot be broken down into pieces as different decisions might be interconnected and dependent on each other and many times , different alternatives isn't even visible to many people when making hard choices , so I don't think this can help in breaking down all the decisions , but definitely helpful in most of the decisions. But none the less : Kudos , you have done a great job @devhoag .

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6yr ago

Will Hoag

Decisionize

Maker

@aalpanigrahi Thanks for the input Aashish. That's a great point that I hadn't really thought about before. You're right, in that this might not work for all decisions, especially if a choice is missing that someone can't really see. Perhaps I've framed it too broadly or perhaps it's better suited paired with some exploratory step beforehand. Ideally, this would help distinguish between a list of preknown choices, interconnected or not, by way of scoring based purely on return value of each. They can have the same pros and cons, or the same affect, but so long as there some are different, one should come out on top. If not, the app displays the results as a tie, which means you can go back and reassess how you got there, or decide there is no better choice. If I don't fully understand what you mean by interconnected decisions, please feel free to elaborate. Still though, it's not perfect, and I'd like to find ways to improve it. Currently I think there could be some more fidelity to ranking eash pro/con and also might be better to score on a curve or give the option to pick a curve to score on. Still exploring ideas that'll keep it simple and useful.

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6yr ago

Aashish Loknath Panigrahi

@devhoag By inter-connectedness of decisions I mean that let's say that we have 3 options - A , B & C but A is dependent on B , If B isn't chosen then the outcome of A would be irrelevant. Sometimes , even options aren't even straight forward. One more example would be :- I have to raise N million dollars from a VC for my company or ensure that I have sufficient control over my company by stock voting power , but If I don't raise N million dollars then my company dies , but if I do then I will lose control over my company .

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6yr ago

Will Hoag

Decisionize

Maker

@aalpanigrahi Ahhh, yeah. That makes a lot of sense. There really isn't any mechanism to account for odds like that. I think as it stands, I would structure it as a choice between B & C with the "Chance at A" being a Full Pro 😀 of B, but counterbalance it with "High Risk of Failure" as a Full Con 😢 of B. Think this approach would still work for your VC vs Stock voting power as well, though it could end up as a tie, depending on how you value the pros & cons of each. In the general case, your company dying seems like the biggest Con, bigger than losing voting power, so I would end up rating accordingly. Still though, it's not very elegant or straightforward and I see your point quite clearly now. I'll have to think of some way to narrow the scope of types of decisions this is best for, or widen it to better support interconnected choices like you've mentioned. Really appreciate the feedback and detailed explanation. Honestly I hadn't thought that deeply about it because I've always been able to structure my choices in this way. But to your point, I would often imbibe my Pros and Cons with risk directly in the titles. Works for now, but would be nicer if there was a dedicated mechanism to account for that!

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6yr ago

Aashish Loknath Panigrahi

@devhoag : Hey Will , I was thinking about decisionize again & I thought , what if weightage points could be attached to each pros and cons from 1 to 10 because not all pros and cons have the same weight : Some cons or pros might have a greater weight than others.

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6yr ago

Will Hoag

Decisionize

Maker

@aalpanigrahi Totally! Right now you can weight between -2 and 2 via 😢🙁🙂😀, but with more fidelity (1-10 etc), it would be more flexible. I had that same thought myself and think it would be more useful and more accurate in certain situations. Have had a lot of discussion about how to implement more fidelity like you discussed already. But any UI/UX solution I've come up with comes at the cost of simplicity. Which at this point feels like it would be worth it, but if you have any ideas, I'm currently looking at all implementation options. Again, thanks for the feedback. Really helps me get a sense for how people are using the app, so super appreciated!

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6yr ago

Will Hoag

Decisionize

Maker

The idea for this originated when I made the odd-ball choice to change careers from animator to software developer. Facing many options, I needed a way to elicit the total value I would receive from each. After some thought, I ended up making a spreadsheet with the steps above and used the numbers to tally the scores. The idea was simple, but I hadn't heard anybody describe their own decision making process in these terms before. Surely, people must make decisions like this intuitively, but when I asked around, many hadn't considered how they make decisions at all. Since it worked so well for me, I made this to teach the concepts and be an easy way to share results.

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6yr ago