Decision Maker Help Documentation

A complete guide to the Decision Maker, from the first option to the review.

Last Updated: November 10, 2026

1. Getting Started

Type what you are deciding, for example "Which laptop should I buy?", and press Start. The decision opens with six tabs: Frame, Weigh, Pros & cons, Head to head, Spin and Decide. Use as many as the decision deserves; a green dot on a tab means you have used it.

To see every tool with data in it, press Try an example: a laptop decision with three options, four criteria, pros and cons and head to head rounds. In a hurry, Quick spin and Flip a coin start a small decision on the Spin tab.

2. Your Decisions

The first screen lists your decisions, newest change first, each with its status (Open, Decided or Reviewed), its due date or "Overdue" while it is open, the number of options and when it last changed; a decided one shows the choice and its stars. Click a card to open it. The list can show all decisions or only open, decided or reviewed ones. The bin on a card deletes that decision, with Undo in the message. Inside a decision, Your decisions above the tool, or Esc, brings you back.

3. Frame: the Choice and the Options

• Title: at the top of the decision; click it to change it.
• Why does this matter? What a good outcome looks like, in your words.
• Decide by: a date; the list shows it, and "Overdue" once it has passed while the decision is open.
• How easy is it to undo? and How much is at stake? Click again to clear a choice. From these two answers the tool suggests where to start and links to that tab.
• Options: two to twelve. Type one and press Enter, or several separated by commas. Drag the handle, or press Alt and an arrow key in a name, to reorder. The cross removes an option with everything it has (Undo brings it back).

4. Weigh: the Scoring Table

Add criteria with the box under the table (several at once, separated by commas) or Suggest criteria. Each criterion is a column with its name (click to rename), a cross to remove it and a Weight slider from 1 to 5. Each option is a row with a slider from 0 to 10 under every criterion; scores start at 5. The Total column is the weighted sum as a share of the most an option could get, and the leading row is marked.

Below the table, the Ranking shows the totals as bars, then the verdict (next section) and Why X is on top: each criterion's share of the leader's total. On a narrow screen the table scrolls sideways.

5. Robust, Fragile or Moderate

Once you have moved a score, the tool tests the ranking: for each criterion it tries the weight one step higher and lower, then two steps, and so on, and checks whether another option would then be strictly ahead of the leader.

• Tied: the top two have the same total. Add a criterion that separates them, or accept that either is fine.
• Fragile: one step on one weight hands the win to another option. The tool names the criterion, the direction and the option that would win.
• Robust: the leader is ahead by 10 points or more, and no one-step change moves it.
• Moderate: the rest; the tool names the smallest change that would hand the lead to another option, if there is one.

6. Pros and Cons

Each option has a card with a Pros and a Cons column. Type an argument and press Enter. The three dots say how much it counts: one dot minor, two counts, three a deal maker or deal breaker. The badge on the card is the net: the pros' dots minus the cons' dots. Below the cards, Net score ranks the options and adds a note: thin evidence when an option has fewer than two arguments, a tie, a three-dot con on the leader, or the leader with its points for and against.

7. Head to Head

Two options at a time; click the one you would rather have (or press A for the left one and L for the right one), or Cannot choose (T) for a tie. Every option meets every other one once; the bar shows how many rounds are done. The pairs come in a random order, and the side each option takes is random too. Undo takes back picks one by one, Restart clears the rounds. When all rounds are done, Wins ranks the options (a win counts 1, a tie half), says who won the round robin, whether the top two finished level and how their own match went, or that your picks went in a circle.

8. Spin and Flip

Choose Wheel or Coin. The wheel holds the decision's options in their colours; press Spin in its middle (or Space). The pick comes from your browser's secure random numbers, every option has the same chance, and the winner is the slice under the pointer when the wheel stops. "Remove the winner after each spin" takes winners off the wheel until you leave the tab. The coin's sides can be renamed (Yes and No to start with); press Flip. With reduced motion set on your device, the wheel and the coin settle at once. The History lists the last 30 spins and flips with your feelings.

9. The Gut Check

When the wheel or coin lands, the tool asks what you felt: Relieved, Nothing much or Disappointed. It answers in a line (relief is your answer talking; disappointment means you wanted something else; no feeling means you are indifferent or something is missing from the wheel), and once one answer (an option or a side of the coin) has two or more relieved checks more than disappointed ones, it tells you that you keep feeling good about it. Feelings about the wheel's picks become the Gut check column in Decide.

10. Decide

What the tools say is a table of each option's rank in every tool you used, with its score there, and an overall share: in each tool the first option gets full points and the last none, ties share a rank, and the overall share is the average. The note below says whether all tools agree, the leader leads but the tools disagree, the top two are level, or the result rests on one tool.

Make the call: write an optional pre-mortem (it is a year later and it went badly: what happened?), pick your choice (the leader is marked "leading"), or "Something else, or not deciding yet" and describe it, write why, and press Decide. Copy summary copies the whole decision as text.

11. The Review

A decided decision shows the choice, the date, your reasons and pre-mortem. When you know how it turned out, pick one to five stars, write what happened and what you would do differently, and press Save review; the decision becomes Reviewed. Edit review changes it, Reopen decision makes the decision open again (with Undo).

12. Export, Import and Share Links

• Export (under Your decisions): every decision in one JSON file, named with today's date.
• Import: reads such a file, up to 20 MB. A decision with the same id as one in your list replaces it; the others are added, up to 500 decisions. Every value is checked: texts are cut to their limits, numbers kept in their ranges, and anything that is not a decision is left out.
• Share link (above the tool, inside a decision): copies a link that carries the decision after the # sign. Whoever opens it gets their own copy, marked "(shared copy)" if they already have a different version. Links over 60,000 characters are refused; use Export.

13. Keyboard and Accessibility

Every button, field and slider works with the keyboard. The tabs are a tab list: the left and right arrows, Home and End move between them. Inside the tool, 1 to 6 switch the tabs and Esc goes back to your decisions; in Head to head A, L and T pick; in Spin, Space or Enter spins or flips, except on a button, which they press as usual. In an option's name, Alt and the up or down arrow move it. Elsewhere on the page these keys do what they always do. Wide tables can be scrolled with the arrow keys once focused.

14. Privacy

The Decision Maker works in this browser, and nothing you type is sent anywhere: no upload, no account and no server-side storage. A share link carries the decision after the # sign, which browsers do not send to servers, and the page removes it from the address before anything else loads. Like every page on ZeroDataUpload, the page shows advertising and counts visits; the cookie banner explains the choices and the Privacy Policy explains both. What you type is never part of them.

15. How It Was Checked

Before this page was published, the engine behind the tool was checked against references written from the rules on this page, with the test values made first: 113,351 cases in 15 groups. They include the weighted totals and the robust, fragile and moderate verdicts of 4,001 decisions (2,500 of them with options close together, so that small weight changes matter), pros and cons, head to head wins and circles, the Decide table, the summary text, 3,700 decisions and files made to break the tool, share links with Hindi, Russian, Chinese and emoji text, and every day from 1900 to 2100. Fairness was checked by chi-square: 660,000 spins on wheels of 2 to 12 options (each one stopping inside its slice), a million coin flips and 360,000 head to head orders. Then the page was tried at four screen widths in both themes.

16. Troubleshooting

• The ranking does not change. Every score starts at 5; move the sliders. The tool says so while all scores are still 5.
• The wheel says "Add options to spin". Add at least two options in Frame. "Everything has been picked" means every option was removed by "Remove the winner"; switch tabs and back to refill the wheel.
• Copy does not work. Some browsers block pages from the clipboard; a window then shows the text to copy yourself.
• "That share link could not be read." The link was cut short when it was sent. Ask for it again, or for an Export file.
• "Could not save." The browser's storage is full or blocked (some private windows). Export your decisions to keep them.
• My decisions are gone. They are kept per browser and device; a private window or cleared browser data starts afresh. Import an Export file to bring them back.

17. Support

For questions the FAQ does not answer, use the contact form.