the 10/10/10 rule

three questions, under a minute, and it works best on exactly the decisions where you are least able to think clearly.

suzy welch's rule, from her 2009 book of the same name. you ask how you will feel about this decision in ten minutes, in ten months, and in ten years.

that is the whole thing. it survives because it does one specific job well: it separates how a decision feels right now from how much it will actually matter.

what each horizon is for

ten minutes. the immediate emotional cost. the awkward conversation, the confrontation, the discomfort of saying no. this is the horizon that dominates when you are stressed, and it is the one that almost never matters later.

ten months. the practical consequence. will the revenue be different, will the team be different, will you have wasted a quarter. this is usually where the real answer is.

ten years. the identity check. does this compound into the thing you were trying to build, or is it a detour that felt urgent.

the pattern it exposes

run it on a decision you are avoiding and you will usually find the same shape: unbearable at ten minutes, clearly correct at ten months, irrelevant at ten years.

that is the signature of a decision you are avoiding for emotional rather than analytical reasons. seeing it laid out across three columns makes the avoidance harder to keep doing.

the reverse shape shows up too, and it is worth catching. fine at ten minutes, fine at ten months, quietly wrong at ten years. that is the shape of a comfortable decision that takes you somewhere you did not intend to go.

where it is weak

it is a clarifier, not an analysis. it will not tell you whether a price rise is correct, only whether your reluctance is about the price or about the conversation.

and the ten year horizon is mostly theatre for operational decisions. almost nothing you decide this week matters in ten years, which is occasionally the useful finding and more often just noise.

for that reason the honest version for most business calls is closer to 10 minutes / 10 months, with the ten year question reserved for the handful of decisions that genuinely set direction.

using it properly

write the three answers down. this is not a rule you run in your head, because in your head the ten minute answer shouts loudest and the other two never get said.

then do the thing the framework does not do for you: pick, put a date on it, and record what you expected. a clarifier that does not end in a committed decision has just been a pleasant way to think about the problem again.

if this is a call you have run through your head several times already, the decision fatigue calculator will tell you what the loop has cost. the fuller picture is in decision making for founders.