Leaders are evaluating costs and making decisions pretty much every day.

Here is a list of all the costs (more or less) that you should consider when making decisions.

Evaluating costs

• Direct Costs: Money you actually spend—like paying for pizza, tools, or your new subscription you’ll forget to cancel in three months.
• Indirect Costs: Sneaky expenses hiding in the background, like electricity, rent, or the mysterious “admin fee” you see on every bill.
• Opportunity Costs: What you miss out on by picking one thing over another. Like skipping your friend’s party to binge-watch a show (and regretting it later).
• Sunk Costs: Money already gone, never coming back. Like that gym membership you used once, or the fancy gadget gathering dust in your drawer.
• Time Costs: All the hours you’ll never get back, spent waiting, working, or trying to remember why you walked into a room.
• Delay Costs: The price of procrastinating—missing out on deals, opportunities, or just making everyone wait for your “genius idea.”
• Transition (or Adoption) Costs: The awkward “getting used to it” phase—like learning new software, moving house, or wearing new shoes that hurt.
• Health Costs: When a decision gives you stress headaches, sore muscles, or just the urge to nap under your desk for a week.
• Relationship Costs: Upsetting your team, your family, or friends because you made a big decision they didn’t love or they were on the other side of the opportunity cost.
• Failure Costs: What you lose when things go wrong—like money, time, or your dignity after that ambitious karaoke performance.
• Reputation Costs: When your great idea doesn’t work out, and now everyone has an “I told you so” look on their face or your decision damages the reputation of your communities.
• Legal and Compliance Costs: Paying up because you forgot to read the fine print—or accidentally broke a rule you didn’t know existed.
• Sustainability Costs (External Costs): The price we pay when decisions harm the planet—like using way too many single-use coffee cups or spewing a lot of greenhouse gases to move your workforce around the city.
• Adaptation Costs: Locking yourself into something now and later wishing you had left a back door open—like getting a yearly subscription to three sports streaming services…that never have anything good over the summer.
• Maintenance and Upgrade Costs: Keeping things working, fixing what breaks, and updating stuff—like your phone, your car, or your favorite pair of jeans.
• Engagement Costs: The vibe check—bad decisions can zap everyone’s energy and make Monday mornings even worse.
• Learning Costs: The time, money, and patience spent figuring out new things, sometimes with lots of trial, error, and googling “how to…” (and the cost of not doing this – the opportunity costs of not learning something are important to track).
• Community Impact (also Externalities): The effect your decisions have on everyone around you—like causing more traffic jams, or becoming a local legend (good or bad).
• Culture Costs: What happens when your choice sets a new rule—that everyone expects you to bake cupcakes for every meeting from now on.

Every choice we make incurs and activates costs. This list represents a great starting point for evaluating costs that will inform and impact your projects, plans, and every day work.