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Cost-benefit Analysis for Making Decisions

You can apply a cost-benefit structure to making decisions. It involves doing the following:

• Take inventory of where your character is in your Game.
• Record and analyze your current resources.
• If you made a decision, hit the fast forward button for one year, two years, and envision where your character would be in your Game. What resources would you have then?
• Fast forward the same length of time and imagine your character did NOT make the same decision. Where would you be in your Game, and what resources would you have?

You can apply these questions to a wide range of scenarios. You can also adjust the number of years you are looking at for impact based on a decision’s type and magnitude. For example, you can apply it to your week if you are worried a decision might affect a short-term goal. Or you can find out the cost of going over to a friend’s dinner party versus staying home to work on a project tonight. An example of a longer-term question would be the cost of quitting your job to study a new program. For this, you may skip ahead five years to calculate the decision’s cost-benefit.

Based on your answers, you’ll clearly see whether your decision benefits your character. This process also lets you balance the current cost of making your decision against where you will be later in your Game as a result of your decision. When you evaluate decisions in this way, you sometimes find the cost of not making a decision is much greater than the resource cost required to execute the decision. This process is a great way of putting decisions into perspective and aligning them with your Game’s direction.

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