Never take decisions too fast or too slow.

With the news around the COVID-19 pandemic developing quickly, people are making decisions — often quickly — on everything from whether to cancel meetings to how to best project their family and colleagues.

?In a time of crisis and uncertainty, there are several psychological factors that impact our ability to make decisions.

Our brains are responding to a sense of threat, a deep feeling of uncertainty, and a lack of control and information, all of which leads us to make short-sighted decisions that may fill immediate psychological needs but aren’t necessary in the long term.

To make better choices, we need to slow down and access the deliberative reasoning part of our brain. Any decision to act should be based on deliberation, sober reflection on data, and discussion with experts —

Taking them too fast will cause the decisions to become flawed in many ways and taking them too slow will cause immense confusion thereby turning towards a wrong path altogether.

As a business owner, this same tendency holds me back, resulting in missed opportunities and intense decision fatigue. I’ve often joked about hiring someone to outsource my decision-making to—except I can’t seem to decide whom to hire.

Lately, I’ve been forcing myself to practice arriving at decisions faster by recognizing that even if I make a less-than-optimal decision, the net result is still better than dragging out the process until my mental resources are drained.

With all the uncertainty in the world right now, making decisions quickly is a skill we need to develop.

So how can we make faster decisions in business (and in life)?

I’m going to break down a few decision-making strategies I’ve found useful. But first, I want to answer the big question:

What’s the advantage of speedy decision-making anyway?

When we have a choice to make, it can feel advantageous to take as much time as we possibly can. After all, the more time we have, the more information we can gather, right? Maybe.

Delayed decision-making costs money

Slow decision-making leads to burnout?

Most people think that decision fatigue is caused by making lots of decisions, but that’s not always the case. This drain of mental resources can also occur if you remain indecisive about just one decision.

Dragging out a decision is the equivalent of mental multitasking. Your brain is constantly switching back and forth between choices, weighing its options, which leads to burnout and decreased focus.

Making quicker decisions isn’t about being rash or ignorant. Instead, it comes down to having a system in place for handling decisions and rigorously following it.?

Disclaimer:?The information on this POST is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional advice. The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. All content, including text, graphics, images and information, contained on or available through this article is for general information purposes / educational purposes only, and to ensure discussion or debate.

Thank you?...Decision-making becomes easier when you know your values and don’t let your emotions get in the way of sticking to them.?

For example, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, psychologist Daniel Kahneman recommends that if you’re hiring for a sales position before you interview anyone, create a list of six traits that are important to the role. As you interview candidates, give each a score on a scale of one to five on each trait.

In the end, tally up the scores and commit to choosing the person with the highest score, even if you feel like someone else might be a better fit.

?Analysis paralysis can set in when you spend too much time researching options versus committing to one. But how do you know how much time is too much time spent on research?

There are a few methods out there, but my favorite is the 37 % Rule or Optimal Shopping.?

According to the book Algorithms to Live By, if you stop at 37% of your search, you have a 37% chance of picking the best option. If a less-than-half chance seems dismal, keep in mind it’s still mathematically the highest chance you’ll get.

If we were hiring at random, for instance, then in a pool of a hundred applicants we’d have a 1% chance of success. And in a pool of a million applicants, we’d have a 0.0001% chance.”?

But, if you stop optimally, you always have a 37% chance of success—whether you’ve got 10, 100, or 1 million choices!

You can also view this as a Look-Then-Leap Rule.

Spend 37% of your time looking at your options (but not committing to any). And then ‘leap’ by picking the first option that is better than any you’ve seen before.

Optimal stopping guarantees you won’t drag out a decision unnecessarily, and it ensures you’ll have the highest chance of making the best one.

Do you want to add a word or two?..

Slow decision-making leaves you vulnerable to competitors?

There’s a saying in sales: “Time kills all deals”. In business, you have to move swiftly, before someone else steals your idea or customers.

Faster decision-making was linked to better performance, while slow decision-making was linked to poor performance. In one case, a firm’s delay in coming to a decision caused it to eventually go bankrupt.

One reason you might be having a hard time making a decision is that it’s not a choice you should be making at all.

For instance, if you’re the CEO, you don’t need to be making decisions about your company blog’s editorial calendar. The ones working closest to it (the marketing team) will have better insight to make the fastest decision.

Your comments?....?

Use the 5-Second Rule to activate the part of your brain that makes intuitive decisions

The 5-Second Rule is deceptively simple. Whenever you get an instinct to move toward a goal that’s important to you, count down 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 and then take action immediately.

Now, this doesn’t work for every decision. It’s not just about acting on any instinct, it’s an instinct that’s tied to a goal.

Use the 2- Minute Rule to be more decisive and finish quick tasks

This decision-making strategy, proposed by David Allen in his book Getting Things Done, works for minor decisions such as making a call to a client, writing an email, or scheduling an appointment.

While it may seem overly simple, it works because it frees your brain from wasting time and energy thinking and re-thinking about trivial decisions.

The fastest decisions of all, of course, are snap decisions. These are ones you make based on your intuition or a ‘gut feeling’.

But how often can you rely on such a thing?

You can trust your intuition in remarkably few situations. Only use intuition if the decision you are about to make meets the following criteria:

You are given a predictable environment. The environment must be relatively stable with lots of repetition.

You are an expert. This means you must have logged hundreds or thousands of hours in this type of environment.

You will get instant feedback on your decision. The decision must grant you immediate feedback. For example, in chess or tennis, your next move will instantly let you know whether it helped. In business, however, this is rarely the case.

You cannot, for instance, receive quick feedback on whether a new hire was the right choice as it takes weeks to train them before you see how they actually perform.

Many experts will talk about how they ‘just know’ a decision is the right one. Yet, self-confidence is a poor measure of the validity of intuition. Only in situations that meet the above criteria should you pay any attention to an expert with a hunch.