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Good decisions often come from reducing complex choices to a single, meaningful variable.

Businesses already use this idea by tracking key metrics, like sales performance, as single numbers.

The same approach works in personal decisions, by finding your own version of "time to sheep."

“Time to sheep” may be the best metric that I’ve heard of for measuring the livability of a city. For a real outdoorsy person, the exact number of minutes it takes from their front door to livestock matters more than square footage, rent, crime rates, or the hundred other variables people look at when choosing a place to live.

If you're the kind of person who's interested in improving your quality of life, you know what’s most important is to know what's important. Because when we can reduce a complex decision to a single, well-constructed variable, we can transform a multi-dimensional puzzle of competing desires into a simple sorting problem. “Time to sheep” as a metric makes it easy to compare options by making the most important trade-offs more explicit, ultimately leading to better decisions.

The rock band Van Halen used a somewhat similar idea while touring in the 1980s. Buried deep in their technical rider was a seemingly absurd requirement: a bowl of M&M’s with all the brown ones removed. To the technicians setting up the venue, this must have looked like pure rock-star diva behavior, an eccentric demand from people with too much fame and too little restraint, but we now know that the band didn’t care for the........

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