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- Quick Decision-Making: A Concept...
Quick decision-making:
A concept that will completely change how you look at productivity
How many choices have you made today? How many of those choices were important to get right? Is it worth taking 30 seconds of your time to decide whether you should go and buy groceries or take a trip to the bank first? You'll get the answers to these questions soon. In this article, I am going to show you how the concept of quick decision-making can drastically improve your productivity.
What Does The Research Say?
Most online sources say that we make around 35 000 conscious choices every day. If you sleep 7 (choice-free) hours a night, that means you make 34 choices every single minute. That's around a choice every 2 seconds. To arrive at that number, the researchers must have included all the minute, almost unconscious choices, like - you choose to pick up a pen - you choose to flick it around in your fingers before starting to write - you choose between a number of different words to start the first sentence with... and so the day goes on...
Now it's not so difficult to imagine how all those decisions add up to 35 000 in a day.
However, it's not those choices that I want to talk about in this article. I am going to talk about the more conscious, time-consuming choices you make every day.
Sheena Iyengar, an American psycho-economist, did a survey around nine or ten years ago where she asked over 2000 Americans how many choices they made in a typical day. On average, they reported making around 70 choices a day. That says something about how many of those 35 000 choices you are actually conscious of.
How Can Quick Decision-Making Affect Your Productivity?
The kind of choices I am going to discuss in this article can often be difficult to notice, so I would humbly argue that the number of choices you make every day that has an effect on your productivity is more than 70.
What I mean by this is that the way you process many of your daily choices can really affect your productivity, or more accurately, your efficiency. A lot of time is wasted on thinking about what choice to go with when faced with a choice rather than just immediately executing one of them. The great majority of the choices you face on a daily basis are just irrelevant noise where the outcome doesn’t matter at all.
To explain what I mean, I have made a very rough calculation of how many of these types of choices we make every day. Let's say you make one choice per minute that has a potential effect on your efficiency. That's over 1000 choices a day if you sleep 7 hours a night (assuming you don't make any decisions while you're sleeping).
Let's say you take 8 seconds on average to decide between each choice. That means you're wasting over 2 hours every day on meaningless, trivial pondering! If you use the concept of quick decision-making and cut this process down to 3 seconds, you can potentially save more than an hour of your time every day. Many people would kill to get an hour more a day. Quick decision-making is all about making up your mind straight away when facing a choice where the outcome has no long-term effect.
What this essentially means is that in every task you do there are multiple decisions to make. You can get your tasks done quicker by cutting the time it takes to decide on them. The reason why you can cut down the time without it affecting the quality of your work or life is because the choices are completely insignificant. The outcome of the decisions doesn’t matter AT ALL. Just look at these examples:
- Shall I wear black or grey socks today?
- Which youtube video am I going to watch while eating breakfast?
- Should I check the notifications on my phone now or wait five minutes?
- Am I going to reply to this email now or later?
- What word shall I choose in this article - "amazing" or "fantastic"?
- Shall I leave now or wait 2 minutes?
- Cucumber or pepper on my toast?
There's hardly any need to hire a lawyer to answer any of these questions. Still, we sometimes take ages mulling over them. These types of decisions only affect our immediate future. It gives us a sense of satisfaction if we choose the "right" one. That's why we're sometimes taking far too long to decide what chocolate to buy for our train journey, even though we know deep inside that the result doesn't matter.
On the other hand, there are decisions where the outcome matter immensely:
- Shall I hire Frank or Daisy for the new position?
- What will the protagonist's final decision be in my new screenplay?
- What's my calling in life?
- What university shall I go to?
- What should the subject of my PhD thesis be?
- Solar power or nuclear power?
- Shall I marry Andy or George?
- What domain name shall I choose for my new website?
These questions often require a lengthy evaluation and do not fall under the same category as the trivial ones I mentioned earlier.
In between the trivial and the crucially important we find questions that matter a little bit. It is often worth taking some time considering the pros and cons of these:
- What title shall I choose for my new blog post?
- What shall I get mum for Christmas?
- Shall I stop buying Christmas presents altogether to stop contributing towards consumerism?
- Shall I buy a gym membership or workout in the lounge?
Identify The Trivial Choices and Make a Decision Quickly
Here is what you need to do. Whenever you’re facing a choice, you need to identify what group it falls under - hugely important, slightly important or irrelevant. If the choice is insignificant, spend as little time as possible on the decision-making process. Make up your mind immediately. In short: Get on with it. Your life is more important than that. Save your time and energy for those decisions where the outcome matters a lot.
If you feel trapped and unable to make a decision, think about how much the outcome of that decision will affect what you’re doing. Hiring someone is usually a very important decision, and you should weigh up the pros and cons carefully. The choice you end up going with can have an effect on your business for many years. The same goes for deciding on a business name or a title for a piece of artwork. In contrast, “what seat should I select for my train journey?” Will only affect the time the train journey takes and is, therefore, a pretty trivial and unimportant choice.
Your aim should be to operate on autopilot mode for most of the time except for when you're facing the more important choices. Get rid of the noise! It might take some practise, but if you follow this advice, you will see your efficiency skyrocketing!
I would love to hear how you're getting on with your new quick decision-making skills, so please leave a comment below.
Sources:
https://raywilliams.ca/neuroscience-can-help-us-make-better-decisions/
http://science.unctv.org/content/reportersblog/choices
https://www.ted.com/talks/sheena_iyengar_choosing_what_to_choose/transcript?language=en#t-141544
