The 37% rule tells you when to stop looking and choose

The classic secretary problem (or optimal stopping problem) asks: if you're interviewing candidates one at a time and must decide on the spot whether to hire, with no going back, what's the best strategy? The provably optimal answer is to spend the first 37% of your candidate pool purely gathering information — rejecting everyone, no matter how good — then hire the very next candidate who beats everyone you've seen so far.

This exact math applies whenever you face a sequence of options you must accept or reject immediately: apartment hunting with a moving deadline, or even, more loosely, dating with an implicit timeline in mind.

The rule doesn't guarantee the best possible outcome — no strategy can, given uncertainty — but it maximizes your odds of getting the single best option compared to any other approach, at roughly 37% success versus much worse odds for stopping too early or too late. Takeaway: give yourself a real "look-only" phase before you let yourself commit.