Your inbox is brimming with new emails, and you need to decide which to reply to quickly and which to ignore. You try to schedule something for next week, but your calendar is already packed with recurring meetings. So many employees have asked for a particular day off—or requested a particular shift schedule—that you can’t grant all their requests. You post a job listing for a single position and get 250 applications.

These situations arise constantly in our work lives, and their analogues come up in our personal lives. But despite their frequency, we often struggle with how to handle them. We barrel through our inbox and move things around on our calendar. We follow (perhaps unwritten) rules to determine which employees get requests filled and which do not. Sometimes we decide it’s too

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