The Consequences of Deciding and Timeing

This article on the consequences of not deciding brought to mind a story about one of the US presidents (sorry I don't remember where I heard it or the president's name): When asked to make a decision, he would ask how long he could wait to make it. Then he would ask the person to come back in that amount of time and then he would make the decision. Almost always he would have better information to decide with and sometimes all but one of the options where clearly wrong that that point. The trick here is that he needed to get a correct answer to his question; how long could he wait without causing other problems or adversely effecting his options. The upshot is, make decisions as soon as you must, but no sooner.