What to focus on

In anything we do, there’s always ~20% of activities that will deliver 80% of our desired results.

It’s easy to be wrapped up in ‘busy’ work without ever getting anything done. Pareto’s Law is a useful mental model to be more effective, rather than just be efficient.

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. So try placing artificial time limitations.

If we’re given three hours to complete a task that normally would take an hour, we’ll find a way to fill those three hours. However, when we’re down to the final thirty minutes, we’re suddenly feeling the pressure to get things done. 

• Appoint an executive sponsor to work with a project lead to frame important decisions for senior leaders to weigh in on;
• Break things down (with decision meetings at each stage), and connect them up.
• Focuses on debating the solution (instead of endlessly elaborating the problem) and gather the right people.
• Move faster without losing commitment: get comfortable living with imperfect data and being clear about what “good enough” looks like.

• Identify decisions that involve a cross-cutting group of leaders, and work with the stakeholders of each to agree on what the main steps in the process entail.
• Work through a set of real-life scenarios to pressure-test the system in collaboration with the people who will be running the process.
• Limit the number of decision-making bodies, and clarify for each its mandate, standing membership, roles etc.
• Create shared objectives, metrics, and collaboration targets.

It's important to have an idea of what your daily priorities are and tasks you need to complete, preferably the night before. 

Also, make sure you prepare in the evening the outfit you're going to wear and the meals for the following day. Doing this will save time in the morning, and reduce decision fatigue.

Take all of your tasks and place them into four quadrants:

• To do first: the most important responsibilities that need to be done today or tomorrow.
• Schedule: important tasks that are not urgent.
• Delegate: essential items that are not important.
• Don't do: tasks that aren't important or urgent. 

You need to have absolute clarity over 3 fundamental facts:

• Your goals (the destination)
• Your current situation (your coordinates)
• The path that connects both of them (the route).

A very simple, but crucial principle: if you don’t know where you are, you can never reach the place where you want to be.

Making an alternative choice is hard because we are neurologically wired to favor the default solution, even if it brings suboptimal results.

As the complexity of a decision increases, so does our tendency to stick with the answer we know.

This is when serotonin is at it’s natural high, which helps to calm our brain. Thus, we feel less risk averse and so we can face risks and make harder choices.

If we’re feeling hunger, thirst or sexual desire, that can actually spill over into the decision areas of our brains, making us feel more desire for big rewards when we make choices. 

This can lead us to make higher-risk choices and to want for more.

The metaphor is as follows: Imagine a financial committee meeting to discuss a three-point agenda.

• A proposal for a £10 million nuclear power plant
• A proposal for a £350 bike shed
• A proposal for a £21 annual coffee budget

The committee normally ends up running through the nuclear power plant proposal in little time because it's too advanced to really get into it.

The bike shed proposal takes much longer as everyone knows what it is and has an opinion that they want to air about it.

As the committee moves on to the coffee budget, suddenly everyone is an expert. _Before anyone realizes, they spend longer discussing the £21 coffee budget than the power plant and the bike shed combined.

The simpler a topic, the more people will have an opinion about it. However, when we mostly understand a topic, we feel compelled to say something, lest we look foolish.

With any topic, we should seek out the inputs from those who have done the work to have an opinion. If we want to contribute, it should be something valuable that will improve the outcome of the decision.

Design your life like a choice architect:

• Encourage smarter decisions you want to do by making them more accessible.
• Add friction to habits you want to quit, making them less accessible, or remove the option to perform them completely.

“First, never underestimate the power of inertia. Second, that power can be harnessed.” 

Save small decisions for after work (when decision fatigue kicks in) and to tackle complex decisions in the morning, when your mind is fresh. 

A similar strategy is to do some of the smaller things the night before to get a head start on the next day.

...and you'll able to look at decisions as objectively and rationally as possible.

Strong decision-makers know that a bad mood can make them lash out or stray from their moral compass just as easily as a good mood can make them overconfident and impulsive.

Loss aversion refers to our tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses over acquiring gains.

Availability Heuristic appears when we assume that the examples coming to mind easily are the most prevalent.