I have been thinking about the various types of decision makers-my girlfriend and colleague told a great story the other day at lunch. She is a microwave and her husband is a crockpot. What if we could all be insta-pot-make a variety of decisions with ease and clarity.

Inspired decisions-I want to look at what inspires our decision making process. 

Time-

Urgent vs. important. I think about urgency as someone else’s agenda attempting to control my schedule. How many times has a project or an opportunity been presented to you with a sense of urgency? All the time! It is only urgent because someone along the line did not meet their deadline. Good decision making about the things we can control and have some knowledge of requires spending time considering our options, relevant materials, professionals. Urgency in most cases is not your problem unless you are the one who created the circumstances.

Importance is very different. Important decisions have implications for next steps, for financial gain, for our wellbeing. Important decisions take time and maybe not as much time as we think. 

In our world of instant access, instant information, insta-cart 😉 it is necessary not to fall into the immediacy trap. Just because we have so much at our fingertips does not make it a good thing. The simplest example is google-we can google anything. We can google almost anywhere. AND most people will only look at the first page or two of a google search, most people may not realize that the first handful of hits are paid to be there, most people will not look past the information to inquire about the date, the author/source, the context. Most people are looking for the information that confirms what they already think they know, and google is set up to serve us in this way. Confirmation bias is real and rampant in the digital age. I want to continue on our path of looking something up, google serves us the perfect answer, we add this information to our brains trusting it is real and relevant because it goes along with what we already know, then in some cases we will act on this information. A benign example would be you are looking for a restaurant nearby, you may indicate you would like Italian food, and boom you have the top-rated Italian place. You end up enjoying a delicious meal out. Like I said, this is benign. A higher level decision may be to look for doctor or financial advisor recommendation, or information about a mental health question. The search in the case of looking for people can be helpful because you will end up with someone near where you live or work. In the case of mental health, you could end up just about anywhere. Decision making requires some patience especially when you are wean yourself of the urge to succumb to urgency ‘real’ or imagined. 

My grandmother instilled the message in both my mom and me that making a decision quickly meant you are smart and basically a better person. Taking too long would be ridiculed. Making a ‘bad’ decision would be ridiculed as well, just to be clear. This coming from a woman who married a not-very-nice man, divorced him while pregnant with her second child, an Irish twin, and who also viewed taking time off for being sick was a sign of weakness. Oh, the old country! My grandmother was a very smart woman if not an academic. Who knows where she got the idea that quick decision making was directly correlated to your IQ? She was/is not alone in that belief at least in the United States. I can see the science behind it; in order to survive, you need to run from the tiger the second you hear, see, know there is a tiger coming. Our brains as wonderful as they are, are faulty in the way they respond to stress. Everything is a tiger. Meaning when you are feel anxiety/pressure/stress to make a decision then our brains can easily mistake this for a survival level response. My recommendation is to use this set of questions to get clarity. 

What happens if I do not act on this today, this week, ever?

 Is it my problem to solve? 

Are there natural consequences that will come into play?

Do I need more information to make this decision? If yes, then ask.

What is the smallest action I can take to address this?

What is the simplest action I can take to address this?