There can be many pitfalls to the plethora of choices we’re faced with on any given day—however being over-cautious about navigating them can make things worse.
We’re faced with a multitude of decisions every day. Don’t assume you’re adding value by thinking longer about making choices. The faster you make them, the more quickly you gain real-world feedback and can adjust your plan or gain experience for next time. Often, our “extra” thinking is rumination or procrastination—we’re afraid to commit to a plan and the prospects of failure.
One of the biggest mistakes that intelligent people make is assuming theoretical or abstract knowledge is helpful in most situations. Surprisingly, it’s not—at least for many of the expected decisions we must make in a typical day.
Take these two decisions to be made, for example:
1. Whether to buy a basic dishwasher or upgrade to a higher quality one in the hopes that it lasts longer.
2. Which library book to read next.
In both cases, thinking about these decisions for more than a couple of minutes is unlikely to yield further insights. There are likely tradeoffs either way you go, and many of them are unknown at the time the decision needs to be made. Is the more expensive dishwasher more reliable? Is this longer book worth the extra commitment? It’s impossible to know!
Cultivate a ‘Gut’ Sense
By making decisions and paying attention to the outcomes, you’ll gain a better “gut” sense of what you value. Maybe it takes buying a couple of cheap dishwashers that don’t last for you to finally upgrade. Perhaps you have to start a half dozen books before finding one you love.In both cases, you’ve gained real-world knowledge that will help refine future decision-making. Sometimes, however, it’s impossible to filter through the chaos of choices. So, you splurged for the nicer dishwasher, and it failed. Now what? Well, that’s the nature of life and decision-making, and another reason it’s not worth driving yourself crazy trying to optimize for the perfect choice.
Faster decision-making is just plain more fun, but a quick decision also has other advantages. I have wasted far too much time reading reviews on Amazon or pondering a choice I had to make. This state of uncertainty is stressful and leaves you feeling less empowered. Simply making a choice and sticking with it feels great. You get an immediate feeling of boldness and agency that may make your choice more likely to work. Over time, you’ll have
more refined instincts and find that your initial thoughts were often just as good—if not better—than your long, drawn-out pondering of most topics.
Tips to Ignite Decision Making
For all those reasons, the average intelligent person could benefit from making decisions faster. Let me share a few tips to help you get into this new state of mind:
1. Limit Your Choices From the Outset
The more options you have, the more overwhelming a decision can be and the less satisfied you’ll feel about the one you choose. A
2009 experiment developed a novel way to test this theory by showing certain users search results with many more options. Predictably, that group was less satisfied and confident in their selections. A realistic path to faster decisions is reducing the categories of choices up front. For example, instead of broadly searching for a place to dine out, decide on a category such as Mexican and look only at those options.
2. Stop Searching as Soon as You Find ‘Good Enough’
Sticking with the example of choosing a restaurant, let’s say that you decide on Mexican as a category, open up the app of your choice, and immediately find an interesting-looking Mexican restaurant with good reviews that’s not too far away. Stop there! Don’t keep looking for an even better option. Because the truth is that without a personal recommendation, you are merely guessing at what you’ll like more. The best way is to choose one and try it out. Adding more choices will only slow you down, but worse, it siphons your enjoyment and plants doubt that you’re making the best choice.
3. Approach Decisions With an Experimental Mindset
We procrastinate with decisions because we’re trying to optimize for all the variables we care about. But this is the real world, after all, and that means unpredictability and surprises. Sometimes, the very best memories in life are the ones that exceed our expectations, catch us off guard, or turn out to be something different from what we expected. Making faster decisions is a way to embrace this possibility by saying, “I don’t know what will happen, but I’m eager to find out.” The more decisions you make and the faster you make them, the more quickly you’ll learn your preferences—far more quickly than through endless introspection.
4. Set a Limit If You Need More Time
I won’t deny that sometimes, a little more thinking about a problem can be helpful. But I’ll warn you that the benefits fall off sharply the longer you go. For that reason, I recommend setting a time limit on the front end. You might set a timer for 10 minutes to weigh the pros and cons or give yourself until tomorrow at the same time to make a decision. Another way might be to talk to one friend about the decision and then decide immediately following that conversation. In all these cases, you’re giving yourself more time to think without letting it drag out indefinitely.
