Cover Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels
Hint: You have to practice making tons of hard decisions in a short timeframe
How difficult it is for you to make decisions? Do you sometimes feel like it should have taken you a lot less time to decide on something?
I have a friend who once told me it sometimes takes him an hour to decide on what to wear for the day. If it takes me more than 20 seconds, I feel like I blew it.
How can quick decision-making change my life?
The less time you spend making decisions, the more time you have to spend on things and people that matter to you. Imagine my friend from above. If he loses one hour per day just dressing up, it’s one hour fewer he has to spend time on his hobbies, friends, and family.
And that adds up more than you’d think. On any given day, you take thousands of decisions without knowing it. If you can cut down the time it takes to make decisions, without sacrificing the quality of those decisions, you can get back massive amounts of time.
If you spend an average of four hours a day making decisions and you cut that by half, you have an extra two hours to use however you choose to use it.
What can I do in the first ten hours to make faster decisions?
The first four hours [0–4]
Master simple techniques:
Apply the “what’s the worst that can happen?” principle. When weighing multiple decisions, imagine what’s the worse that can happen for each decision. Most of the time, either decision doesn’t have important repercussions. Picking either is fine.
Use the coin flip method. For small decisions that really don’t have much impact in your life, if you find yourself hesitating for more than a minute, flip a coin. Decide the outcomes before flipping. For example, if you can’t decide between two meal for dinner, decide that “heads” is for meal A and “tails” is for meal B. Flip the coin and never question the outcome.
Delegation. Delegate to someone more qualified to make the decision better and faster. Learn from their answer and process.
“Hell yes!” method. If you’re not completely enthused at an idea, don’t do it.
For the coming weeks, apply these techniques daily. After four hours of practicing them, it will already start to become more natural for you.
The next two hours [4–6]
Lower your standards for perfection. In school, you’re graded by how close you are to having a perfect answer. Not aiming for perfection got punished and was seen as a bad thing. That conditioning is hard to get rid of, but is incredibly important to allow you to make decisions quickly.
In the real world, most decisions don’t matter as much as you’d think. For non-life-changing decisions, you don’t need perfection. What would you rather do in most cases:
Take 10 hours to make a perfect decision?
Take 5 hours to make a decision that’s 80 percent good?
Take 1 hour to make a decision that’s 50 percent good?
For non-life-changing decisions, practice the last option, especially if you can improve upon your decision (hint: you often can). In addition, you rarely know how good a decision is until you reflect back on it. A perfect decision might not be so perfect in hindsight. A 50-percent-good decision might be better than it seemed at first.
The last four hours [6–10]
Practice “what if” scenarios. There’s nothing like tough situations to get your brain thinking. To get a list of questions you can answer, Google “What if questions”. Click on a few links. For each question you find, try to answer in your head or on paper in less than a minute each. It’s harder than it seems. In most cases, there’s no perfect answer, just like in real life.
Here are a few questions to illustrate what I mean (source):
What if you woke up one morning in another country surrounded by people who spoke no English and with only the clothes you slept in, what would you do?
What if you could be famous, but poor forever would you do it?
What if you had the chance, would you change something in the history, risking that, your parents never will meet with each other and you never will be born?
What if you could say a sentence which the whole world could hear, what would you say?
What if you could live perfectly well without sleeping, if you had no need to sleep at all, how would you spend all your nights?
What additional resources can I use to learn to make quick decisions?
Summary
The first four hours [0–4]: Learn the following tricks: Apply the “what’s the worst that can happen?” principle, use the “flip a coin” method, delegate, and apply the “hell yeah” method.
The next two hours [4–6]: Lower your standards for perfection.
The last four hours [6–10]: Practice “what if” scenarios.
You can do this!