How much career exploration is enough?

When do you stop exploring career options? How do you know when you should commit to one job or project?

Ideally, you want to trade off the chance new information changes your mind against the effort it takes to get new information. The longer you spend exploring, the less time you have to actually get stuff done. (More or less -- it’s not a strict trade off since some exploration is also directly useful.)

Except, it’s really hard to do that calculation robustly.

One alternative is to explore, and track when you stop changing your mind about which option is best. Even with an important decision, you only want to spend more time exploring as long as that exploration is changing your mind about which job is most valuable.

To measure how much your mind is changing, you can set up a spreadsheet with probabilities for how likely it is you’ll do each of the options you’re considering.

Try to write down numbers that feel reasonable and add up to 100%. (To avoid having to manually make the numbers equal 100, you can adding numbers on a 1-10 scale for how likely each options feels, and then divide each number by the total.)

Template sheet with example

Each week while you’re exploring, put in your new numbers. As you get more information and your decision is more solid, the numbers will slowly stop changing (and one option will probably be increasingly closer to 100%).

When your probabilities are changing wildly, you’re still gaining more information:

Once they taper off, you’ve neared the end of productive returns to your current exploration:

Ideally, they taper off when you’re confident in one option, as in the above graph. Sometimes, however, they taper off to where you have stable preferences, even if you’re not confident they are optimal, like in the below graph. In this case, you still probably want to commit, at least for a set period of time.

When you have several weeks without new information that changes your probabilities (and you don’t have information you’re expecting to learn soon), you’ve hit diminishing returns on new information. It’s probably time to commit.

After that point, you can reevaluate periodically (I’d recommend about once a year). At each reevaluation point, ask yourself if you learned anything that might make you want to change plans? Are there new options that might be much better than what you’re currently doing? If so, do another deep dive. If not, keep doing the top option.

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