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4 Steps That'll Help You Cut Through the BS and Make a Hard Decision Faster
Being “Supposed To" Choose Something
If you’re feeling pressured into making the decision that looks good, step back and examine your reasoning.
If you can’t come up with a good answer, you know it’s not for you.
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Pretend You're Advising a Friend
Think outside yourself a little and pretend like you're offering advice.
The reasoning here is really simple: your short-term emotions get in the way of decisions, and that clouds your judgment. It's hard to break free of your emotions, but it helps to know they affect your choices.
Limit The Information You Take In
We usually believe that the more information you have, the better decisions we can make. However, at some point, we cross a threshold where we have too much information. That's when we start to fill in gaps and add weight to information that doesn't matter.
This makes decision making way more difficult.
Reverse Your Assumptions
You're so prone to continue making the same kind of choices throughout your life that challenging yourself and doing the exact opposite is often the best way to get around this problem.
The idea here is to confront your default behavior, step outside your comfort zone, and use your imagination to test some completely new ideas.
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For decision-making success:
- Book time to think: It’s counterintuitive, but making decisions faster requires consciously giving yourself time to make them.
- Define the decision: Before delving into deciding, get clear on the nature of the choice you’re making.
- Think through your options: Instead of limiting yourself to a “yes” or “no” choice, brainstorm all the possible options before making a decision.
Fall back on your values
Having clear values that you try to live by can make tough decisions easier.
For example, maybe you know there’s a certain amount of time you want to spend with your family, or a baseline level of debt you’re willing to carry.
Talk it through
You don’t need to speak with someone who’s knowledgeable on the topic.
You just need a good listener who’ll give you time and space to hear out your monologue and occasionally reflect back to you what you’ve shared.
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Increasing your well-being
A growing body of research shows we can reliably raise our well-being.
Reframing the way we think about money and making financial decisions can lead to long-term gains in life satisfaction. Just having money doesn’t necessarily mean greater happiness, but using it well can.
Two categories of happiness
- The level of positive emotions. This includes pride, joy, contentment, and curiosity we experience on a day-to-day basis. How happy you are on an immediate basis fluctuates by the day or even the hour.
- The overarching sense of contentment. How happy you are overall, generally remains the same. When you rate your happiness on a 10-point scale, if you are a seven kind of person, you will often stay around seven.
Buy time
Buying time by outsourcing unpleasant or disliked tasks can benefit our well-being.
Unfortunately, we're not great at valuing time over money. To change our spending habits, it helps to value time more than money. It could mean that we seek a job for its flexibility rather than the salary and prestige.