How to Make Decisions Stick
How to stop re-litigating the same calls, protect decision energy, and run a 20-minute “two-door sweep” this week.
New here? The Inner Game is a weekly note for founders and startup leaders about the psychology and practice of building.
Every week you’ll get one core idea, one tiny experiment, or one founder insight you can apply now.
You make a decision on Monday and somehow you’re back in the same debate by Thursday.
It shows up as: hiring loops that never end, pricing that keeps “needing one more round,” or product bets that get reopened every time new data arrives (even if it’s not new data).
In coaching founders, I see this a lot: the company grows, complexity grows, and your brain starts carrying too many “open decisions” at once. When that happens, you don’t get clarity, you get re-litigation.
In this issue, you’ll get a simple way to spot when a decision is actually reversible, a quick template to “close the loop” so your team stops re-arguing the same call, and one micro-break rule that protects your decision quality during heavy weeks. I’ll also pull in a few lessons from my conversation with and l about two-way doors, letting go of the “how,” and why founders often feel like every decision is life-or-death (even when it’s not).
The Inner Game in 3 Lines
What’s really going on: you’re not failing at decisions, your system is overloaded, so decisions don’t stick.
What changes: better decisions come from better design, not more willpower.
This week’s experiment: run a 20-minute “Two-Door Decision Sweep” and add one 10-minute buffer to protect your brain between high-stakes meetings.
Brain Stuff for Builders
Cognitive overload is rarely a personal flaw, it’s often a design flaw.¹
Most founders are over-relying on the same mental gear all day: planning, choosing, evaluating, and explaining. That work lives heavily in the brain systems associated with focus and executive control and it fatigues under nonstop demand.¹
So when you keep revisiting decisions, it’s not always because you “can’t commit.” It’s often because your week is structured in a way that makes clarity unsustainable.
Back-to-back meetings don’t just drain you, they change how you think.²
Microsoft researchers measured brainwave activity and found that back-to-back virtual meetings increased stress, and that short breaks helped.²
Founder translation: when your calendar has no breathing room, you’re more likely to default to:
reopening settled debates,
grabbing control instead of delegating,
or delaying calls that require tradeoffs.
Micro-breaks are small and surprisingly powerful.³ A 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis found that micro-breaks (very short breaks during the workday) are associated with better well-being and performance.³
This matters because “decision quality” isn’t just strategy and mental processing, it’s also physiology. If your nervous system is cooked, your best frameworks won’t land.
Burnout prevention isn’t just about rest, it’s about autonomy and shared ownership.⁴ When people have autonomy (control over how they execute), clarity (what “good” looks like), and shared ownership (decisions and outcomes aren’t bottlenecked through one person), stress becomes more manageable and less constant. A Business Horizons review highlights practical organizational moves that reduce burnout risk (including strengthening social support, improving job design/autonomy, and engaging people in decision-making).⁴
Founder translation: if every meaningful decision routes through you, you don’t just overload yourself, you quietly de-train your team’s ownership muscles.
What Katrina said that stuck with me
In my conversation with , she used a distinction I love:
The two-way door vs. one-way door decisions.⁵
Two-way door: reversible. You can try, learn, and undo.
One-way door: hard to walk back. You need rigor, not speed.
She also shared a second founder trap:
Be deeply convicted about the problem, but not rigid about the “how.”⁵
Founders win when they protect the why and delegate the how.
When you’re attached to the how, you end up in endless loops:
second-guessing your team,
re-litigating decisions that were “done,”
and keeping responsibility on your back because it feels safer.
A tiny “Two-Door Decision Sweep” you can run this week (20 minutes)
Pick one decision you keep revisiting (hiring, positioning, roadmap, pricing, fundraising timing).
Then do this:
1) Name it in one sentence (2 minutes)
“Are we hiring a senior engineer now or waiting 6–8 weeks?”
2) Classify the door (3 minutes)
Ask: “If we’re wrong, can we reverse this cheaply?”
If yes → Two-way door
If no → One-way door
3) Write the “stickiness clause” (7 minutes)
This is the part most teams skip.
Fill in these four lines:
The “stickiness clause” (why these four lines work)
Decision: ____
Write the call in one clean sentence. This reduces “decision drift,” where different people leave the meeting with different interpretations. If you can’t write it simply, you probably haven’t decided yet.
Owner: ____ (not you by default)
A decision without an owner becomes a ghost task, everyone assumes someone else is handling it, or it boomerangs back to the founder. Naming an owner creates accountability and builds real leadership capacity because execution doesn’t depend on you being present.
We will NOT reopen this unless: ____ (define the trigger)
Most decisions get reopened for emotional reasons (anxiety, pushback, a loud opinion) disguised as “new information.” This line defines what actually counts as legitimate new input: a metric moving, a customer signal, a constraint changing, so you don’t re-litigate the same tradeoff every time the room gets nervous.
We will revisit on: ____ (a date, not “sometime”)
This prevents two failure modes: (1) never revisiting something that genuinely needs review, or (2) constantly revisiting it. A date gives people psychological safety (“we’re not locked in forever”) while protecting momentum (“we’re not reopening this every week”). It also creates a clean learning loop: decide → execute → evaluate.
This turns a decision from a vibe into a contract.
4) If it’s a two-way door, turn it into a test (5 minutes)
Write: “We’ll run this for 14 days, measure X, and decide on Y date.”
That’s Lean Startup in practice: build → measure → learn — without turning every week into a courtroom.⁶
5) Add one brain buffer (3 minutes)
Choose one:
10 minutes between decision-heavy meetings (walk, water, eyes off screen),² or
a 5-minute micro-break every 90 minutes.³
You’re not being “soft.” You’re protecting the machinery that makes your company’s calls.
If this resonates, you might enjoy:
Community
If this made you think of a co-founder or ops lead, forward it to them and run the Two-Door Sweep together. Compare notes on what you’re over-treating as “one-way.”
Founder Circle
In speaking with 100+ founders, I’ve noticed how lonely building can feel: constant pressure, high stakes, and very few spaces where you can be fully honest about what’s working and what isn’t.
The Founder Circle is a small cohort (6 founders max) for early-stage, funded, or serious bootstrapped founders who want clearer priorities, better decisions, and a peer group (plus two coaches) so they’re not carrying everything alone.
Our next circle meets next month! Don’t miss it.
Here’s what past participants have said:
“Hearing other people’s stories and what they’re going through… now I don’t need to wait until I get there. I already have a good idea how I’ll act when I do.”
“Talking through the dilemma I had and having someone ask a few questions… that made all the difference.”
“Knowing there are so many founders out there makes me feel I’m not alone and I don’t need to worry. Anything can have a solution.”
P.S. What’s one decision you’ve reopened more than twice in the last month and what trigger would make it worthy of reopening again?
If you want to go deeper to check out the references used in our research:
¹ Amy Brann, “Stop Overloading the Wrong Part of Your Brain at Work,” Harvard Business Review, 2025.
² Microsoft WorkLab, “Research Proves Your Brain Needs Breaks” (brainwave study on back-to-back meetings), 2021.
³ Patricia Albulescu et al., “Give me a break! A systematic review and meta-analysis on the efficacy of micro-breaks for increasing well-being and performance,” PLOS ONE, 2022.
⁴ Kelly P. Gabriel & Herman Aguinis, “How to Prevent and Combat Employee Burnout and Create Healthier Workplaces During Crises and Beyond,” Business Horizons, 2022.
⁵ Little Pursuits Podcast (2026), conversation with Katrina Purcell (transcript excerpt provided).
⁶ Eric Ries, The Lean Startup, 2011.
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