The spreadsheet called Options

It's a Sunday evening in late February. The laptop is open on the kitchen table, and on it is a spreadsheet called Options. You made it fourteen months ago.

It has three tabs. The first is Course. It's a part-time diploma in garden design at the college across town, two evenings a week for two years, at three thousand two hundred pounds a year. You've wanted to do something like it since before you made the spreadsheet. The second tab is Move. A firm like yours, twenty minutes further away, advertises every few months for the job you already do, at about three thousand pounds a year more. The third tab is Stay. You work in the accounts team of a builders' merchant. It's fine, which is the word you always use for it.

Each tab has the same rows. Money, evenings, security, interest, where it leads. Each row has a score out of ten and a weight. Tonight the totals are 7.4 for Course, 7.1 for Move and 7.2 for Stay. Last month you decided security deserved more weight, and Stay came out on top. In November you'd read an article about people retraining in their forties, and Course led by a full point for a fortnight.

Applications for the September intake close on the thirtieth of June. You know the date well. You've missed it twice.

On the windowsill behind you are six squares of sofa fabric. They came in the post in January. The old sofa has a broken spring on the left side, and everyone in the house sits on the right. You've narrowed the sofa down to two, and you've had it narrowed down to two since the week the samples came.

I'll use a few terms throughout. The loop is the going round. It means thinking through the same options and the same considerations again without reaching a choice. A lap is one trip round it. The default is what happens if you never choose. In the spreadsheet it has a tab, and it's called Stay. For the sofa it's the broken spring. The musts are the few things a choice has to do for you, which I'll set apart later from the many things it would be nice for it to do. The date is a day you set in advance by which you'll have picked.

The loop has some regular features. This list is my own observation and not a research finding.

It feels like work. You sit down, you concentrate, and you finish tired. A lap can take a whole evening.

It runs on old material. If you compare tonight's lap with the one in November, the facts are the same. The fees, the salary and the commute haven't changed. Only your mood about them has.

It nearly ends, often. Several times you've been all but settled, usually late in the evening. By the morning a doubt has arrived and the question is open again.

It gets longer near the finish. The closer you come to choosing, the more reasons you find to check one more thing.

And it isn't confined to large decisions. The person with the spreadsheet is often the person with the fabric samples, and the person reading the whole menu twice while the table waits.

Try one thing before reading on. Write down every decision you currently have open, large and small. Next to each, write roughly when you started deciding it. Then write the date you last learned a fact about it that you didn't know before. The list is for you and nobody else will see it. If the gap between those two dates is small, you may be deciding at a sensible pace and you may not need this book. If the last new fact is months old, read on.