I have been guilty of wasting way too much time pondering decisions that just didn’t matter. Here are two thought traps I fall into where I waste too much looking for the “right” decision.
The Zone of Indifference
Decisions can be easy when the outcomes are wildly divergent. If your choice is between a great dinner with someone you love or slogging at your desk over busy work that just doesn’t matter, your decision is easy. Right? Ok, maybe that’s another blog post. But what if the outcomes are not as divergent or maybe so uncertain that it is impossible to tell what the outcome will be? These types of decisions are where we can spend huge amounts of energy. We can build teams, bring in experts, find better, more granular ways to weigh our outcomes. But why? If the outcomes are that close, the decision shouldn’t matter.
My inner perfectionist is not easily tamed! That guy wants everything to come out right even if the outcomes are ridiculously close to each other. In the long run, it doesn’t matter if you order fish or the chicken.
Downscale Problems
What if the outcomes could vary wildly, but on a tiny scale? A buddy of mine likes to talk about how life is a fractal. We see the same patterns as much as we zoom in or zoom out. The same holds true for decision making. We can myopically focus on a tiny ridge on the map instead of zooming out to focus on the broader slope of the curve. When we try to eek every last bit of efficiency out of the small decisions, our energy is wasted. We lose out on overall effectiveness to become efficient where it doesn’t matter.
We don’t have to put that much energy into our decisions if the consequences of the outcomes are small.
A note to me
At what level is the problem I’m facing? Does the outcome of this decision matter in the bigger picture? What are the consequences of the outcomes? How much time is this problem really worth?
Thanks to Javier Allegue Barros for the photo of the street signs