How fast can you decide?
How fast can you decide correctly?
Speed kills, as they say. And it’s worth practicing.
But it’s worth practicing accuracy, too. Move too fast, and speed will kill you.
Some tips:
- Start small. See how fast you can make decisions of limited consequence (what’s for lunch?), then see if this speeds up your bigger decisions.
- Make predictions, write them down, and then write down the outcomes.
- Decide how much time you’ll take to make each decision. Again, start small: pick your outfit, or lunch, or commute a little faster each day.
- Pre-decide. If you only wear white shirts, you only need to make that decision once.
- Determine which decisions really belong to you, and which belong to someone else. If you decide to trust your subordinates, you’ll save a lot of your own decision-making energy.
- Know when to go slow. Wasting time on decisions of little consequence doesn’t make sense. Neither does it make sense to rush the really consequential ones.
Colin Steele 