4 Simple Hacks To Be More Decisive
“Should I stay or should I go?” should I take this up or not?
This is probably no surprise. For most of us, acting on a choice can be one of the scariest things to do. Especially in today’s lifestyle, where decisions are a bit complicated to take, and information seems endless.
According to the McKinsey Global Survey, it came to highlight that only 20% of respondents across a broad range of locations, occupations, industries excelled at their decision-making skills. This shows that the majority faces issues with adequately making decisions.
Many of us identify ourselves as the “indecisive” one or maybe find ourselves pondering over analytical thinking. You are not alone.
When faced with making a decision, the most essential factor is your ability to trust yourself. It is really important to build that confidence to rely on your voice with clarity and also avoid overthinking to step forward with a bold decision.
Evaluate your decision's true impact
The first step for learning how to be more decisive would be determining its potential long-term impact on well-being by questioning how you will feel about the result of the decision in the next week, month, or year.
Think about the outcomes relative to one another
Not all decisions are low-stakes, some possess huge consequences. When tasked with making a monumental choice, it is advised to assess options relative to one another.
Engage in planning
Eliminating the need for constant decision-making and keeping the brain occupied can be very useful. This can be accomplished by planning. It is advised to make a plan for everything in your schedule and trivial decisions to avoid wasting mental energy on small daily decisions. Indulge in batching of decisions i.e taking an hour on a Sunday afternoon to make a rough schedule of your entire week.
Embrace the Idea of Failure
Probably the biggest fear that comes in the way of decision-making is the apprehension of how things may turn out for us slow decision-makers and that our decisions may lead to bad results.
Then you compensate by overthinking the situation and which causes us to question every aspect involved in the decision. Ultimately, there is a risk of not deciding at all as there is a waste of time and energy on useless questioning—this line of thinking must be rewired.
Instead, just viewing that delaying a decision is worse than actually making a bad decision and just working on them directly on quick decision-making skills. We can just recover and learn something from making bad decisions.
Distribute your tasks to decide which one to start with
Divide a piece of paper into 4 squares. Mark the columns as “Important” and “Not Important”. Label the rows as “Urgent” and “not urgent”. Place tasks you have to do each day in one of the squares. Now it's easier to decide where to begin. Anything urgent and important has to be done as soon as possible, anything important but not urgent can be scheduled later, anything urgent but not important can be delegated and lastly, if something is neither important nor urgent gets cut.
Decision-making is like a muscle that grows with practice. It starts with knowing and trusting yourself. Early intervention and assessment can help us identify the pain points and then we should work on improving our decision-making skills. We can avoid the undesirable side-effects of delayed decisions and assess where we stand to take up steps we need to take to improve it.
