I Make 40 Decisions a Day for Founders. Here’s the Framework I Borrowed From a 1962 NASA Memo.

Last year I started paying attention. Across the companies I was embedded in, I personally made — or unblocked — dozens of decisions a day that the founder would otherwise have made themselves. None of them were strategic. All of them felt strategic to the person who was about to ask the question.

That’s when I went looking for prior art and found a five-page NASA memo from 1962 written by a flight director named Christopher Kraft. It was about how to run Mission Control. It is, accidentally, the best founder-decision framework I’ve ever read.

Kraft’s three tiers, translated for founders

Kraft’s problem: in a crewed spaceflight you have ~1,200 decision points per mission and only one flight director awake at a time. His solution was to pre-classify every decision into one of three buckets. We’ll borrow them verbatim.

Tier 1 — Reversible (60% of your day)

Decisions that can be undone within a week at near-zero cost. Tool choices. Meeting structure. Most hiring rejections. Vendor selection under $10K. Almost all marketing channel tests.

Founders should not make these decisions. Founders should pre-decide the rules for these decisions and let someone else execute. ‘Default to the cheaper option unless ARR-impacting.’ ‘Default to async unless it’s a customer.’ One-line rules, written down, applied by anyone.

Tier 2 — Reversible but expensive (30%)

Decisions that can be undone but at real cost — a misfire takes 30 days and $50K to fix. Senior hires. Pricing changes. Partnership signings. Office moves. Material product cuts.

These should be delegated to one named person — a chief of staff, a fractional operator, a #2 — with a written guardrail of three things they cannot do without you. Everything else, they decide and tell you. Telling you is not asking you.

Tier 3 — Irreversible (10%)

Decisions that change the company permanently. Firing the cofounder. Raising the round. Pivoting the product. Choosing the lawyer for the M&A. Selling.

These are yours. They are the only ones that should ever feel hard. If they don’t feel hard, you’re probably misclassifying a Tier 2 decision as a Tier 3 because you haven’t handed off the Tier 2 work to anyone yet.

Why most founders are stuck in Tier 1

Because Tier 1 decisions feel productive. They’re small, fast, and they generate visible momentum. They are also where the founder’s judgment matters the least and costs the most. Every Tier 1 you make is a Tier 3 you’re too tired to think about clearly tonight.

The exercise — 45 minutes, one weekend

1. Pull your sent email and your calendar from the last 14 days. List every decision you can recall making.
2. Tag each one T1, T2, T3. Be honest.
3. Count. If T1 is over 30% of your decisions, you are running Mission Control as a flight controller. Stop.
4. For your top 10 recurring T1s, write the one-line rule. Send to your team. ‘Going forward, you decide. Here’s the default.’
5. Name the human who owns T2. If there isn’t one, that’s your next hire. Not a marketing lead. Not another engineer. That one.

“You don’t need more focus. You need fewer decisions that deserve it.”— Loosely, Kraft, 1962