The Decision Tom Kept Not Making
I built a free tool for it. Try it on whatever you’re circling this week. This tool is FREE for you to use.
Tom bakes and sells cakes from home. Good enough that people are ordering two weeks out.
But last Tuesday, none of that mattered, because his head was full of three things at once:
Should he raise his prices or not?
A customer wanted a refund he hadn’t responded to.
And five messages were sitting there, unanswered, getting heavier by the hour.
None of these were hard problems on their own. Tom just kept carrying all three at the same time, re-deciding them in his head every few hours without ever actually deciding anything.
By Tuesday night, he still hadn’t raised his prices, still hadn’t answered the refund, still had five unread messages, and he was exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with baking.
I call this decision debt. It’s not procrastination, exactly.
It’s the weight of every unmade decision sitting in your head at once, quietly draining you, long before any of them actually get made.
Most of us are carrying some version of Tom’s Tuesday right now.
What I built to fix my own version of this
I’ve spent the last few months building something for exactly this moment, the one where you have three things circling and zero clarity on which to touch first.
It’s called C.A.O.S. — Clarify, Assess, Order, Simplify. Four short stages, in order, that take one messy decision and turn it into an answer.
Here’s roughly how Tom’s Tuesday would’ve gone with it open in a tab:
Clarify asks one question: what’s actually bothering you right now, and by when does it really need deciding? For Tom, that’s the pricing question, not the refund, not the messages. Just naming it cuts most of the noise before he’s decided anything.
Assess lays his real options side by side: raise prices now vs. wait, with the actual cost of each, including the cost of doing nothing. Waiting doesn’t feel like a choice, but it is one, and this stage makes that visible.
Order takes everything else on his plate: the refund and the messages and ranks them by what actually matters this week, not by what showed up first in his inbox.
Simplify is where the refund and the messages stop being open loops. For each one, he asks: does this need me, someone else, or nothing at all?
And this is the part I’m probably most proud of: there’s a built-in library of ready-to-send messages for exactly these moments. Declining something. Handing something off. Buying yourself time on a decision without disappearing. You fill in the blanks, copy it, and it’s out of your head and into someone’s inbox.
By lunchtime, Tom isn’t holding any of it anymore. Prices are updated. The refund’s handled. He’s back to baking.
I’m keeping this tool free, and I’d genuinely love your feedback
This is the first tool I’ve built like this - not an article, not a PDF, an actual working console.
I built it because I needed it, but I have no idea yet where it’s clunky, where it’s confusing, or where it actually helps.
So it’s free. No product to buy, nothing to unlock later.
C.A.O.S Website: Click the web link here
Then download the access card to get the code and a brief overview
Also providing you with a PDF to read before you start working on the C.A.O.S. system
Once you’re in, try it on whatever’s actually circling in your head this week not a hypothetical, the real one.
And if you’ve got two minutes after, there’s a short feedback form linked right in the console. Tell me what worked, what didn’t, what you wish it did.
Or just reply here in the comments.
I’m reading every response, and it’ll shape exactly what I build next.
Less noise. Better decisions. Calm execution.
Cheers,
I like the framing of decision debt.
I'd add that unmade decisions don't just consume attention because they're unfinished.
They continue competing for judgement every time they re-enter your awareness.
Until resolved, delegated or consciously deferred, they keep asking the brain the same question. Closure is so important for thinking.
Sometimes the greatest value of making a decision isn't choosing well, but in freeing judgement for the next one.
Wow, I can’t believe you’re giving this tool away free - that’s most generous, thank you.