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When costs accelerate non-lineraly, do not delay fixes for efficiency
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10-10-10 process1: What are the consequences of each of my options in ten minutes? In ten months? In ten years?
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In this way we can maintain perspective on our how our decisions are likely to fair. Moreover, it allows us to maintain perspective on the importance of current feeling state. E.g. will you remember a flat tire as terrible in ten years as you might in ten minutes or 10 days?
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Never make a decision you don’t have to make2
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No decision is a decision2
Confidence in knowledge
Being comfortable with instant and “not being sure” is an important part of decision making. We can become better decision makers if we thought less about whether we are confident in our beliefs, but how confident we are in our beliefs1. We can train ourselves to do this by expressing our confidence alongside a statement. For example,
I am 70% sure that John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath.
alternatively
John Steinbeck wrote the Grapes of Wrath, I’m a 7 about my confidence.
Alternatively, you can express the fact as a range of values or outcomes.
What to do when you can’t decide
Paralysis in decision making, may be a subconcious way of your brain feeling there is an essential piece of the decision to be uncovered. In this case you might try a deep focus activity to try and uncover this.
At some point, you do need to just make a decision, the costs of indecision will out weigh any benefits from making the exactly correct decision. The weight of the decision can impair performance across other areas 3.
Jeff Bezos has quote, that has turned into the “70% Rule” 4:
Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.
In short, the 70% rule says that you should make a decision when you are about 70% sure rather than delaying until you have more certainty. Delaying for certainity can lead to procrastination5.
Warning signs that should cause a pause in decision making
When making decisions there are warning signs in phrasing that should give us pause when making a decision1:
- Signs of certainity or speaking in absolutes
- Irrational outcome attribution, for example attributiing an outcome to all luck or all skill depending on the actor. See also self-serving bias.
- Generalizations of people, especially when it comes to evaluate an idea
- Signs that we are blowing a moment out of proportion: “worst day ever”
- Signs of appealing to the crowd: “everyone agrees with me”
- Lack of self compassion: “I have the worst judgment”
- “Wrong” -> wrong is a conclusion not a rationale
- Informing the listener of the outcome to shade their perspective
Scenario Planning
- Consider a broad range of possibilities for potential outcomes and attempt to assign probabilities to their likelihood. At minimum this exercise can help move you from thinking only in binary outcomes of “good” and “bad” 1. However, it also cements in us that the outcome is uncertain, better prepares us for a range of outcomes, and allows us to make ulysses contracts when we anticipate our own irrationality. Scenario planning can be taken many levels deep, with branching sets of outcomes.