AllAmericanBreakfast's Shortform

DirectedEvolution

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I'm annoyed that I think so hard about small daily decisions.

Is there a simple and ideally general pattern to not spend 10 minutes doing arithmetic on the cost of making burritos at home vs. buying the equivalent at a restaurant? Or am I actually being smart somehow by spending the time to cost out that sort of thing?

Perhaps:

"Spend no more than 1 minute per $25 spent and 2% of the price to find a better product."

This heuristic cashes out to:

Over a year of weekly $35 restaurant meals, spend about $35 and an hour and a half finding better restaurants or meals.
For $250 of monthly consumer spending, spend a total of $5 and 10 minutes per month finding a better product.
For bigger buys of around $500 (about 2x/year), spend $10 and 20 minutes on each purchase.
Buying a used car ($15,000) I'd spend $300 and 10 hours. I could use the $300 to hire somebody at $25/hour to test-drive an additional 5-10 cars, a mechanic to inspect it on the lot, a good negotiator to help me secure a lower price.
For work over the next year ($30,000), spend $600 and 20 hours.
Getting a Master's degree ($100,000 including opportunity costs), spend 66 hours and $2,000 finding the best school.
Choosing from among STEM career options ($100,000 per year), spend about 66 hours and $600 per year exploring career decisions.

Comparing that with my own patterns, that simplifies to:

Spend much less time thinking about daily spending. You're correctly calibrated for ~$500 buys. Spend much more time considering your biggest buys and decisions.

5Dagon6y

For some (including younger-me), the opposite advice was helpful - I'd agonize over "big" decisions, without realizing that the oft-repeated small decisions actually had a much larger impact on my life. To account for that, I might recommend you notice cache-ability and repetition, and budget on longer timeframes. For monthly spending, there's some portion that's really $120X decade spending (you can optimize once, then continue to buy monthly for the next 10 years), a bunch that's probably $12Y of annual spending, and some that's really $Z that you have to re-consider every month. Also, avoid the mistake of inflexible permissions. Notice when you're spending much more (or less!) time optimizing a decision than your average, but there are lots of them that actually benefit from the extra time. And lots that additional time/money doesn't change the marginal outcome by much, so you should spend less time on.

I wonder if your problem as a youth was in agonizing over big decisions, rather than learning a productive way to methodically think them through. I have lots of evidence that I underthink big decisions and overthink small ones. I also tend to be slow yet ultimately impulsive in making big changes, and fast yet hyper-analytical in making small changes.

Daily choices have low switching and sunk costs. Everybody's always comparing, so one brand at a given price point tends to be about as good as another.

But big decisions aren't just big spends. They're typica... (read more)

AllAmericanBreakfast's Shortform

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AllAmericanBreakfast's Shortform

7