Free guide · for any big decision
Free Frame the Decision Mini-Guide
There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from a decision you have been carrying for weeks — the tiredness of having had the same conversation eleven times and knowing you are no closer to an answer. Most advice for that starts with how to compare the options. This starts three steps earlier, because that is where most decisions actually go wrong, and because all three steps can be done tonight, on paper, before you look at anything.
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What it does
- Shows you how to notice that your question arrived as a yes-or-no — a thing and the absence of that thing — and the roughly four-minute move that widens it without widening it forever: ask what the yes is trying to get you, then ask the same of the no.
- Walks the whole thing through on one worked decision carried end to end — an invented household's, so every figure behind it can be printed — from the badly-framed version it arrived as to the three genuine options widening it produced. It is already filled in; there is no blank template waiting for you.
- Gives you four prompts that force the option nobody listed, including the two people skip: what somebody with half your budget would do, and the version of the plan without the part you are dreading.
- Makes the case that killing an option properly is a result too — a background worry you have considered and rejected for written reasons stops coming back, which is much of the relief people tend to describe after finally deciding.
- Replaces “how much should I research this?” with a question you can actually answer: what would it cost to undo? Four reversibility classes, from a returnable order to a one-way door, and what each one earns.
- Carries four of the twelve decision traps — the ones that fire before any scoring starts — each written as what it sounds like inside your own head, with the tell and the counter-move.
- Ends with four exercises, about 80 minutes in total, needing nothing but paper.
- Eight pages, US Letter. Nothing to fill in, nothing to log into, and no email required.
Related reading
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Want the arithmetic as well as the framing?
This is the front of the method — everything that happens before you start comparing. The full playbook is 109 pages across four PDFs and adds the part that makes it arithmetic rather than advice: it computes its own argument on the same worked decision. The matrix comes out 3.95 to 3.84, a lead of 2.8 percent; then it works out how far one weight would have to move to reverse that (3.1 points out of a hundred) and which criteria cannot change the answer at any weight at all. It applies the four ways a careful, honest person rigs their own scoring — two of the four reverse the winner. It takes two people's differing weights over one matrix and finds which few differences are actually producing the different answers. And it turns the unwind cost you just estimated into a diligence budget, then spends it against twenty priced checks ranked by what they would change. Plus a criteria library of 57 criteria across seven kinds of decision, the other eight traps, a worked pre-mortem, the decision record, and how to review the outcome without rewriting the story.
A one-time purchase, four PDFs you keep. No login, no seat, no renewal — and it will still open in ten years when your children are choosing between two places to live.
General decision-making guidance, not financial, legal, medical, or tax advice, and not a substitute for a qualified professional who knows your situation. The worked decision, its options and its figures are an invented household's own planning estimates, written down so the reasoning can be followed — they are not research, and no reader should carry a number out of the guide into their own decision. Free to use; please don't resell or redistribute.