Decision making?

Making decisions isn't the thing to avoid.

It is the time that we spend on making each decision that should be considered. 

I watched a TedEd video recently that talked about decision making algorithms. My major takeaway was a statement by the speaker (paraphrased):

"the time spent on choosing what task to take on is also time taken away from doing that task"

Yeah, that’s a bit confusing. Although this doesn’t apply to all tasks, it applies to most of the low-level tasks we encounter each day.

Let's take reading the mail as an example. Instead of choosing what mail to read first (looking for the most important mail), we could be more efficient and save more time if we read the mail without sorting. You see, the time spent sorting the mail is time taken out from actually reading the mail itself. Well, that is if we are going to read the whole mail.

The major idea is to spend less time making decisions on tasks with little consequence. We have a limited attention span everyday, don’t spend it on low-level activities.

Hope this helps