Here is a simple strategy that many people have found useful for speeding up decision making. It is a way of overcoming procrastination in general, and does not take a lot of effort. However, it needs consistent practice if you want it to be effective for the rest of your life. I have used it daily for years. I call the strategy Thinking and Doing.
First of all, a couple of points about why procrastination is such a popular, but frustrating, pastime:
- Delaying making a decision is a “safe”thing to do, because it prevents you from making a mistake right now.
- The trouble is, every time you delay, you get a small feeling of relief, but automatically your brain makes you more anxious about making future decisions.
- So you end up in a vicious cycle where your delaying behavior is rewarded, and your decision-making becomes more difficult.
So how do you reverse this destructive process?
We all know that the standard answer for getting over our fears is to face them. The question is how to learn to face them and win. And the answer is to practice first with making easy trivial decisions. Each day you need to practice making rapid decisions about things that are slightly outside your comfort zone.
To give an example:
Whenever a thought comes into your head that requires an action, you decide to complete that action immediately, wherever practical. To be more specific:
- Each task needs to be done immediately, as it crops up in your head.
- The tasks should be as simple as possible, such as:
- making a phone call you need to make,
- paying a bill,
- taking out the garbage,
- picking up a piece of clothing off the floor and putting it away,
- getting out of bed,
- doing the dishes
Whatever the task, make sure you do it
- as quickly as possible,
- as soon as possible,
- and don’t stop until you have finished the task.
Decide to do at least 10 trivial tasks a day; the more the merrier.
Obviously what may be trivial for one person may be extremely difficult for the next. But the major point of this simple exercise is that the more of these trivial tasks you do, the sooner you will notice that it is getting easier to make decisions about more difficult tasks.
If you practice this simple exercise for a couple of weeks, you will notice a remarkable change:
- Your feelings of discomfort about decision-making will begin to subside.
- Rather than seeing the task as uncomfortable, you will begin to perceive it as challenging, exciting, and, on occasion, exhilarating.
- You will also begin to get a stronger feeling of being in control.
By facing these mild feelings of discomfort this way, you will find that it is a lot easier to make more rapid decisions about your more significant decisions. Of course this does not mean that you won’t make wrong decisions at times. But your fear of making mistakes will decrease as you find out that we can gain a lot of useful information from your errors.