A week, a fortnight, a month, a season.
A Counsel.day decision runs for a duration you set at composition. The right duration is not the shortest you can tolerate; it is the time over which the moods that actually drive the decision will move. Below is a guide by class of question.
Durations by class of question.
Why the duration is the point.
The duration is the work. Single-conversation decision-making fails not because anyone is reasoning badly, but because a single conversation captures a single mood · the mood of that evening, after that day, in that room. Counsel.day captures the actual shape of how each of you feels across the period that suits the decision, then names what you were arguing about. A 90-day family decision sees a full season's moods. A 14-day home decision sees a fortnight's. The duration controls the resolution of the data.
Choosing too short defeats the mechanism. Choosing too long is occasionally tolerable but rarely necessary. The numbers above came from talking to early users; you are not bound by them. The system enforces a 7-day minimum to keep the analysis statistically meaningful.
You can extend. You cannot shorten.
Once a decision is running you may extend its duration · for example, you started at 30 days and want to take the question to 45. The verdict day moves; the votes already cast are kept; the system continues exactly as before. You cannot shorten a running decision, because shortening defeats the patience that the duration is enforcing.
If you need to stop entirely, you can cancel · the decision and every vote inside it are destroyed. There is no partial verdict, by design.