Precompositional decisions may also include which key, scale, style, genre, or idiom in which to write, to use techniques such as the twelve tone technique, serialism, or not to use a system at all.
Precompositional decisions do not necessary, and almost always do not, preclude compositional decisions, and may actually allow the initial consideration of the choices made. One might say that, "thus, while it liberates imagination as to what the world may be, it refuses to legislate as to what the world is" (Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World). Thus precompositional decisions do not necessarily ease the compositiional choices.
On the other hand the concept of precompositional decisions is unclear as it is often impossible to determine which decisions occur before or during a composition.