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Decisions – When to think:

Making decisions can be one of the hardest things humans do. They fret, they worry, and they make themselves unhappy all during the process and even afterward by second-guessing their decision.

I break decisions into two discussions – first is when to think (the second is how to deal with major decisions – will be the next article in this series).

I am a ‘problem solver’ both by personality type and in my career. People bring me problems, and I try to solve them. (Sometimes, this is to the dismay of my wife, who can just be looking to talk about the problem and really not looking for me as a ‘problem solver’. It is a work-in-process to get me to turn it off.)

In any event, I am used to making lots of decisions. To make my life (and jobs) better, I needed to figure out how to deal with all these decisions that confronted me. Here is the method I ended up figuring out:

Decisions can be easily sorted into three types — large important decisions, small repetitive decisions, and everything else. And yes, ‘everything else’ seems to be about 98% of the decisions I make each day.

Big decisions are worth spending some time thinking about. (As noted above, I have some help on this one – in the next article.)

Small repetitive decisions are worth figuring out a good answer to, like finding the quickest way to work and back, since it happens a couple hundred times a year. These are normally easy to research and solve because they are small.

All other decisions, ‘everything else’, should not cause you much concern or thinking time. Just pick one choice quickly and move on.

This philosophy makes most decisions unthreatening, like which lane of the freeway to be in… Really, I have watched people get frustrated, put themselves and others in danger, just trying to get a better lane, which in and of itself often slows down around the next curve. And even if it does save two minutes, is the stress, high blood pressure, danger, etc. really worth it? Better to focus on the things that really matter.

And don’t get me started on how some people can make figuring out what to order at a restaurant a decision that seems as tough for them as figuring out what beaches to land on for D-Day in World War II. Just pick something and enjoy the people at the table with you.

This method has saved me thousands of hours of wasted time and agonization. And if I sometimes don’t pick the perfect thing at a restaurant to eat, at least I feel good that I didn’t waste a lot of time picking something bad…