10/10/10

Ask how you will feel about this in ten minutes, ten months and ten years, to stop an immediate feeling from settling a long question.

Time cost: 5 min
Output: Three written answers.
Steps: 5

Use when

A near-term emotion is clearly driving the choice.
You are avoiding a conversation, or about to have one badly.
The decision feels urgent and you suspect it is not.

Do not use when

The ten-minute view is the relevant one — some decisions really are about the next ten minutes.
You are using it to dismiss a feeling that is carrying real information.

Inputs required

The decision
Two minutes

Procedure

01
Write the hesitation
What you are avoiding or agonising over, in one plain sentence.
02
Ten minutes
How will you feel immediately after deciding each way? This surfaces the emotional reaction. It is data about costs you will actually bear, not noise to suppress.
03
Ten months
What is the practical and emotional situation then? Most short-term discomfort has resolved; most structural consequences have arrived.
04
Ten years
Does this register at all? If not, you are overweighting it now. If it does, that is the horizon the decision belongs to.
05
Compare the three columns deliberately
The method works by making the ten-year column visible at all. Do not let the first column win by being the loudest.

Characteristic failure mode

Used to dismiss the ten-minute column entirely. Immediate feelings are real costs, and a decision that ignores them produces a choice you will not carry out.

Worked example

Someone is avoiding telling a collaborator that the arrangement is not working.

01Ten minutes: uncomfortable, possibly an argument.
02Ten months: either a working arrangement or the same problem, larger, with more invested.
03Ten years: the conversation is forgotten; the pattern of avoiding it is not.

Result

The ten-minute cost is real and lasts an hour. The ten-month cost compounds. That comparison was the whole decision and took two minutes to see.

Where to go next