Making hard decisions
Making decisions can be both easy and difficult, depending on one’s personality. I consider myself an analytical thinker and (largely because of that) a rather good decision maker. Of course, that doesn’t mean I never struggle with hard decisions. But when that happens, I have a couple of proven techniques to support me. In this post, I’d like to describe those techniques in hope other people will find them useful too.
Clear your mind #
The more impactful the decision, the more important it is to make it with a clear mind. Here are a few practices I use to achieve that state:
“Air your head out”, as we say in Hungarian. Take a walk in the neighborhood, get some fresh air, and let your blood flow a bit.
Cool down. I mean that literally: reduce your body temperature. Go wash your hands and your face. If you are into that, take even a cold shower.
Center yourself. Sit down, close your eyes. Take a couple of deep breaths to steady your breathing. Select a point in your body, like the tip of your nose or the center of your chest, and focus your attention on your breath going through that point. Count your inhalations and exhalations for a while.
Which one of these I use depends completely on the situation (time of day, my physical location, etc.) and what I feel I need the most at the given moment.
Make a list #
For some decisions, making a simple list may suffice. Grab a blank piece of paper or open a new text file and jot down the consequences of each option. Sometimes just the act of putting your thoughts onto (digital) paper is enough, because it keeps you from running in circles inside your head. I mean that many times, no matter how hard I focus, the number of things and the connections between them to keep in my mind at the same time is simply too great. This leads me to jump from one topic to another in an infinite loop, ending up with not much more than what I started with. Writing everything down always solves this problem by giving me a visual representation of my thoughts that I can then reason about either separately or in relation to each other.
Much greater thinkers than I have also employed this method in their personal lives with success. Like Charles Darwin, when he was deciding whether he should get married or not. From that article:
Not marry:
Less money for books, etc.
Marry:
Object to be beloved & played with - better than a dog anyhow.
Big dilemmas for a big mind for sure!
Build a table #
When a list is not enough to properly see through the complexity of your two options, turning it into something more formalized, like a table, is usually the best next step. To do this effectively, you’ll need a computer. Enter the PDT (Péter’s Decision Table).
(In case my blog somehow outlasts Google Sheets, here’s a downloadable spreadsheet file with the same content.)
You’ll find two sheets in there:
Template: this is the empty template you can make a copy of to build your very own decision-making table.
Example: this demonstrates how the template looks in action. I’ve filled it out with the imaginary hard decision of adopting cats. (It’s imaginary because it wasn’t a hard decision for us at all. As you can see in the table, in hindsight, I am much wiser, of course…)
The idea is to put the aspects of your decision into the middle column. Then go through them and write the pros to the left and the cons to the right of each. After that, you need to score them. I’ve used a scale of 1 to 5 where 5 is “very good” for pros and “very bad” for cons. (To make it more precise, you can use a larger range - like 1 to 10.) If there are no pros or cons for a given aspect, leave that cell empty and set the corresponding score to 0.
The table summarizes the scores in the second row, and subtracts the sum of cons from the sum of pros in the first row. If the final score in the first row is greater than 0, it becomes green, which means your answer is “yes”. In case it’s 0, it becomes yellow, which means it’s a tie: you might as well flip a coin. If it’s a negative number, it turns red, signaling that you should go the other way. Looking at the magnitude of the final score, you can also see the strength of your conviction in your decision.
After you’ve filled out the table for the first time, it’s good practice to immediately look through it once more to adjust all the scores relative to each other. Make sure you iterate a couple of times on the whole thing, adding new or removing existing aspects and their pros and cons, as well as adjusting scores. I can guarantee that you won’t get it all perfect on the first try. But that’s also the key to doing this exercise successfully: at one point you need to stop changing the table, recognize it’s good enough, and you are ready to make up your mind. Practice will help with gauging the right time for this.
Guiding thoughts #
As a closing, here are some thoughts that function as guiding stars for me while going through the exercises outlined above:
Don’t let your short-term fears compromise your long-term goals.
A quote from my favorite fantasy book series, the Realm of the Elderlings:
Don’t do what you can’t undo, until you’ve considered what you can’t do once you’ve done it.