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Patricia
writes, "I get annoyed with myself when I take a long
time to come to any conclusion. I am pretty convinced
that it has cost me a lot in form of
anxiety and lost opportunities. What can I do to be
able to make decisions in a reasonable period of time?"
I
know this well; my wife has the same problem. There is
no good answer but I have helped her by giving her some
exercises that force her to take small, harmless
decisions in a short period of time (eventually you
learn to take bigger decisions without overanalyzing).
For example, I will tell her to decide before the
waiter
comes if she wants a
beer or
wine. Or decide right away if we should
eat at Mexican or
Pan-American restaurant. You can do this yourself by
forcing yourself to take small decisions within a set
time period, like, I will decide by 5 PM today if I am
going to
buy a skirt or not. Once you make a decision,
stick to it. We all need to live with the consequences
of our choices so it is OK to make mistakes. We are
human after all and cannot make perfect decisions all
the time.
That
brings me to the next point. Do not try to get it right
all the time.
Life is too short to live perfectly.
Accept that you are human and will make mistakes.
Learn from them and
move on.
The
third point is that if you are taking as long to decide
if you want
soup or
salad with your meal as
buying a new house or
choosing
an employer, you have a problem. The only way to
deal with it is to
look at the level of risk of a decision and
accordingly allocate time to it. Since the
risk of choosing salad or soup is minimal, it should
not take more than a minute, but for
life changing decisions it is fine to think them
over for days/weeks/months, but in all cases stick to a
timeline and then simply take the best option after
analyzing each one. Remember that over-analysis does not
necessarily gives better decisions but it is fine to
look at
pros and cons of each option, lay them out on a
matrix, and then pick the one that seems
most logical. |
