Back in 2017 I wrote a post about how to avoid decision fatigue and it’s a great post, if I do say so myself. I highlighted how reducing the number of decisions you have to make in the first place is an important place to start and prioritizing the decisions you have to make is key to ensuring you’re spending your time and energy on what matters most. I also wrote about 4 ways to make great decisions that goes into even more detail on how to come to an optimal decision.
Joe and I made a few decisions recently that could be considered pretty “big,” but we found them easy to make. I’ll share more in a future post about what those actually were, but when I was telling a friend about it she was a little surprised about how quickly and seemingly easily we made the decisions. As I talked her through our thought process, I realized that we were able to do this because we recognized that there wasn’t a significant long term impact on what we were choosing to do.
Oftentimes we look at decisions and think that they are going to alter our lives entirely. This leads to us agonizing because we want to make sure that we are doing right by our future selves. But when you look back at all of the choices you’ve made up to this point in your life, how many have actually changed the trajectory of your story significantly? I’m going to guess not a whole lot. This understanding is liberating because you can make decisions more quickly with less heartache – after all, you can always make a change in the future!
When you are facing a scenario like this, you can consider your options and sleep on it, but realize that sometimes it’s best to just go for something by putting it into perspective and moving forward. Joe and I even flipped a coin while we were deciding on something because we knew that there was no “wrong” or “bad” decision and that it would be most valuable to save our time in a debate than weighing pros and cons.
The goal of this post is to inspire you to let go of the notion that there is a “perfect” decision that requires much contemplation and to recognizing that it can often be best to just make a decision and see where things go, course correcting along the way.
How do you make decisions? Do you find your daily and life choices easy or hard?
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