In 1838, Charles Darwin took out his notebook and made two lists that have since become famous. One was headed "Marry", the other "Not Marry": they were his attempt to analyse, methodically, the pros and cons of seeking a wife. "Charms of music and female chitchat," he wrote under "Marry", and "someone to take care of house". The downsides included "loss of time" and "perhaps quarrelling", but on balance he seemed pro-marriage. "Picture a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire and books... compare this vision with the dingy reality of Great Marlborough Street," he wrote. And: "Better than a dog, anyhow."

Darwin concluded that he should marry, and a year later he did so. (He married his cousin - an intriguing decision for an evolutionary theorist, but that's another story.) There's something alienating about Darwin's lists, though - something repellent about using ultra-rational methods to make such an emotional decision. Even for less weighty dilemmas, there's lots of evidence - popularised in Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink - that we're better off relying on gut feelings. That can be true even when there's an objectively "right" answer: in one study, people asked to choose the best equipped of several cars were more often wrong when asked to analyse their reasoning than when they judged intuitively.

But gut-based decision-making has its own problems: what if you're carried away by a passing mood, or overlook some crucial bit of information? Psychologists and others suggest several decision-making tricks that blend the rational and the intuitive:

1. Assess the problem's complexity. Gut decision-making actually works best for bigger decisions, while rational methods work for smaller ones, according to a recent Dutch study. If you're choosing running shoes, it's worth listing the factors involved - cost, comfort, appearance - and weighting their importance to you. But proposing marriage or changing career involves so many factors that rational analysis will make things worse: you'll fail to take account of some, or assign too much or too little importance to others.

2. A time-honoured method for bringing unverbalised feelings into sharp focus: take a coin, assign one option to heads, the other to tails, then toss it. But don't uncover it yet; monitor your emotions instead. What are you hoping the result will be? There's your true preference.

3. Start rational, then go intuitive. The philosopher-psychologist Paul Thagard suggests writing out your goals, your options, and the likely consequences in detail. Study them. But then go with your gut. This way, you use rational methods to prepare the ground for a good intuitive judgment.

4. Use a timer. Often, what we think of as deliberation is really hours of indecision, followed by a snap judgment. Set yourself a time - a few minutes, for everyday matters - to indulge this feeling. Then make that snap decision. You were going to do so eventually anyway.

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com