Don't buy unbranded merchandise. A typical paragraph should be from a third to half a typed page long. A man should marry a woman half his age plus seven years. Spend one percent of your proposed spending making sure you will be spending the money well. Many times such rules do not result in the best decision, because individual cases vary so much.
Rules of thumb do have the advantage of leading to a decision in a short time.
As we mentioned in the previous chapter, in this technique, the first satisfactory alternative is chosen rather than the best alternative. When you want to write a note, you just grab the first suitable piece of paper rather than looking all over to find the very best one in your room or office. Looking for the very best would be the optimizing strategy, which is decision complicating rather than decision simplifying. Satisficing is preferred for decisions of small significance, when you're in a hurry, or where most of the alternatives are essentially similar. Perhaps this technique is only apparently simplifying, since the person given the decision to make may have complexity enough.