How Herbert Simon's 'Good Enough' Rule Stops You Over-Researching Everything

Every tab you open past the fifth one is working against you. Herbert Simon, the economist and cognitive scientist who won the Nobel Prize in 1978, spent decades studying how people actually make decisions rather than how textbooks said they should. His conclusion was blunt: the human mind does not optimise. It satisfices, a word he built from 'satisfy' and 'suffice', and the decisions that come out of that process are, on balance, better than the ones that come out of exhaustive search.

Simon's core claim was that optimising is a fantasy. To find the truly best option, you would need complete information, unlimited time, and a stable set of preferences. None of those conditions exist in ordinary life. What you have instead is a threshold: a level of good enough that, once cleared, makes further searching cost more than it returns. He called this threshold the aspiration level, and he argued that a rational agent raises or lowers it based on how easy options are to find, not on some abstract standard of perfection. The Arthashastra, compiled across centuries of Indian statecraft, reaches a similar place through a different route. Chanakya wrote that the enemy of a completed task is the pursuit of a perfect one, the principle holds whether you are choosing a general or a cooking pot.

The cost of over-research is not just time. It is the quality of the decision itself. When you hold too many options in working memory at once, your ability to distinguish between them degrades. A study comparing shoppers choosing between six jams and twenty-four jams, conducted by Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper at Columbia University, found that the larger display attracted more attention but produced far fewer purchases and lower reported satisfaction among those who did buy. The mechanism is not mysterious: more options mean more criteria, more criteria mean more trade-offs, and more trade-offs mean more regret regardless of what you choose. Simon's satisficing sidesteps this by making the decision binary. Does this option clear the bar? Yes, take it. No, keep looking, but only until the next one clears it.

The part most people skip is defining the aspiration level before the search begins. Without it, satisficing becomes a label you apply retroactively to whatever you happened to pick, which is just impulse with a Nobel Prize attached. A workable threshold has three parts: the non-negotiables that disqualify an option outright, the minimum standard on the thing that matters most, and a time limit on the search itself. For a laptop purchase, that might be: must have a certain battery life, must cost under a specific amount, and the decision must be made by the end of the week. The first option that clears all three is the answer. Not the best laptop. The right laptop for this decision.

Satisficing is not for every decision. A surgery, a business partner, a home, these warrant longer search because the cost of a wrong choice is high and the decision is hard to reverse. Simon was clear on this: the aspiration level should reflect the actual stakes. Where the idea earns its keep is in the decisions that feel high-stakes because they are numerous and daily, not because they are genuinely consequential. Which restaurant. Which freelancer for a one-off project. Which version of a report to send. Which route to take. These decisions accumulate across a day and drain the same cognitive resource as the genuinely hard ones. Satisficing reserves that resource for when it is actually needed. The practical move is to identify one category of decision you currently over-research, most people have a clear one, and set a written threshold before the next instance arrives. Written, because an unwritten threshold shifts the moment a slightly better option appears.

Simon spent his career showing that bounded rationality, the kind that works within real limits of time and information, is not a compromise. It is the only kind of rationality that exists outside a textbook. The tabs you never opened were not a failure of due diligence. They were the decision working correctly.