Definition
Decision rituals are repeatable practices you wrap around important decisions to make them harder to get wrong. They include: writing the decision down before making it, running a checklist of the most common failure modes, imposing a cooling-off period, requesting one dissenting voice, and conducting a post-mortem after the outcome is known.
Parrish argues that the biggest improvements in decision-making come not from being smarter in the moment but from installing a consistent process around the moment. A ritual converts an unrepeatable choice into a repeatable system.
The distinction worth marking: rituals are not bureaucracy. They are short, specific, and designed for the kinds of mistakes the four defaults reliably produce.
Why it matters
A minimum-viable ritual
Parrish's recommended ritual is short enough to actually use. Before deciding: write the decision, the alternatives considered, the reasoning, and an explicit prediction of what will happen. After the outcome: revisit the page and write what actually happened and what the gap teaches.
The compounding is the point. Each documented decision adds a row to a personal dataset; patterns emerge that no single decision could reveal.