One-way doors

The idea

Some decisions are two-way doors: if you don't like what you find, you walk back through. Others are one-way doors: once you're through, you can't get back. The idea is Jeff Bezos's, from his 2015 letter to Amazon shareholders. With AI, it's the most useful way to decide where your own attention goes.

AI makes most hard work cheap to redo. A draft, a plan, a spreadsheet, a design: if it's wrong, run it again. What it can't redo is a message already sent, a price already published or a contract already signed. Those small, easy, permanent things deserve your full care, however minor they look.

Why it works

People usually sort by size or difficulty, so a one-line clause or a quick reply-all gets less care than a long report. But the long report can be redone tomorrow. The clause and the reply-all can't. Sorting by “can I undo this?” puts your attention where a mistake is permanent.

Everyday one-way doors

• Sending an email or message, especially to a group or a client.
• Publishing a price, a review, a post or a public statement.
• Signing or accepting terms.
• Paying, or giving out card details.
• Sharing a file or data with someone outside.
• Deleting something with no backup.
• Making a promise: a date, a refund, a guarantee.
• Letting an AI tool send, book, buy or delete for you.

How to do it

1. Before you act on anything AI helped with, ask: what would it cost to undo this?
2. If the answer is “nothing much”, move fast. Don't polish a two-way door.
3. If the answer is “I can't”, stop and read it yourself, slowly, as the person receiving it.
4. Then try to turn the one-way door into a two-way one: save a draft instead of sending, schedule instead of posting, try the price with a few customers first, add an exit clause, keep a copy, take a smaller first step.
5. If an AI can act for you, make it ask before every one-way step, every time.

Here is my plan: [paste or describe].

List every step in it that would be hard or impossible to undo (sending, publishing, signing, paying, sharing, deleting, promising). For each one:
- what it would cost to undo, if it can be undone at all
- one way to make it easier to undo (a draft, a trial, a smaller first step, an exit, a copy)

Then tell me which steps are easy to redo, so I can move faster on those.

Worked example

Common mistakes

• Polishing what you can redo, and rushing what you can't.
• Thinking a step is small because it was quick to do. A sent message took one click.
• Giving an AI tool permission to send or pay “for now” and forgetting it has it.
• Treating everything as a one-way door. That's just slow. Most work isn't.