All About Decisions Making

Confused? Lots of options to choose from? Here are some suggestions on how to calmly and rationally make decisions:

Never make decisions when you are under pressure or in a lot of stress. Your judgment can be clouded by emotions and prejudices. Even if you are forced to make a quick decision, ask if you can be allowed enough time to think about it. Step back even for a few minutes. Take deep breaths and clear your mind.

There is nothing wrong to paying attention to gut feeling. For some strange reason, even if they can’t be logically explained, they often turn out right. Listen to your instincts.

Some people like putting thoughts in writing. You can create two columns – pros or advantages, and cons or disadvantages. These can help you organize thoughts, making decision making much easier.

You can also consider the point of view of others. You don’t need to take their advice, just get different perspectives.

Own it. Whatever the outcome of your decision is, be prepared to take responsibility for the consequences. If you made a mistake, learn from it and use it when making future decisions.

How to Make Effective Decisions

Decisions… Decisions… Decisions can be swift or long-drawn. No matter how long it takes you to reach one, just make sure you try to make effective ones.

• No magic 8-balls
  Don’t ask others to decide for you. Effective decision making involves introspection. Besides, it’s always best to take responsibility for whatever you do.
• Settle for no less than the facts
  Sometimes personal biases and emotions may cloud your decisions. So get the facts straight. Look for possibly distorted ones and weed them out.
• Split the pros and cons
  Decisions will definitely have effects on things. It’s the spark that’d cause a chain reaction. So before you make one, be sure to know what may be the consequences of your action. Though you can only see as far
• Be calm
  If making a decision as a group, avoid hostilities. Clear thinking and not heated arguments is one of the best weapons in making a decision.
• Persuade not argue
  It’s better to come up with a decision with everyone on the same footing. So it’s much better to persuade people in seeing your point of view instead of simply debunking everyone else’s opinion.
Write things down
Seeing things in plain black and white helps you weed out things that needlessly affect your decision.
• If in doubt, don’t decide
  Take a break. Watch a movie. Sleep. Just don’t do anything if you still don’t know what to do.
• Simulate
  Try to run things through your head. Process things like a computer where you have and input, a process, then an output which translate to decision, a reaction, and then a result. If it helps, make a story out of it to help you visualize.
• Stick to what you believe
  Never compromise your ideals. Stand up for what you truly believe in especially if other would like to blackmail you emotionally or mentally.
  
  

  Decision-Making Mistakes that We Often Commit

  
  
  I’ve been making a lot of decisions lately and having been all too preachy on this blog has made me think hard about how I make these decisions. They’re not trivial decisions, mind you. They’re very concrete, very real, and itsconsequences are life-changing. While I wouldn’t go as far as enumerating them, I’m sure that we all face these kinds of decisions once every so often.Career decisions, marriage decisions, financial decisions – these things we can all lose sleep with.

  In the pursuit of something sensible to write, I decided to focus on the factors that often lead our decisions astray. While there are always probabilities to consider with these things, there are decision errors that almost always would really f*ck you up. Here are my picks.

  Hasty decisions. There are times when we need to make decisions in a jiffy but what we refer to as “haste” is a different thing. More liked in the context of “rushed.” This is often committed when one makes a decision without any facts or exploring alternatives.

  Deciding on the merits of the advantages… and only those. Sometimes, when we’re enthusiastic about something, we’re blinded by all the good things about it that we often lose sight of it cons.

  Tunnel vision. Deciding with very limited perspective is a dangerous thing. There are instances where you just try to apply the same framework in doing all of your decisions. Go seek expert advice. Talk to a friend. But don’t decide without getting any other perspective on the matter.

  Heuristics. While there are times when using rules-of-thumb do work, criticaldecisions shouldn’t be made based on a very narrow and very rough frameworks that these rules often are. Heuristics will only work if used in a coherent set.

  Taking into account irrelevant things. Worry warts and paranoid people suffer from this decision making mistake. Even if some things can actually be really negligible, the paranoid in us can force us to worry about these things. And when we do, we end up not focusing on things that do matter.

  Pride. Ah, to be swallowed by your own hubris. Many decision mistakes are made because of letting pride take over everything. This even leads one to commit all the other mistakes cited here. Sometimes, it would help not to think solely about yourself at times.