Everyday Decisions, Done Dirt Cheap
Recently I wrote about the Sustainable Workload Loop I use to keep my myself motivated and from being one of those managers who is constantly busy being busy. One thing I emphasized throughout that article is that deciding what to do is overhead. The time, energy, and motivation you spend just picking what to do next is time, energy, and motivation that you’re not using to get stuff done. Today we’re going to talk about how to optimize those decisions so that they’re less costly, freeing you to spend your limited resources on the things that really matter to you.
The first approach comes straight from that article: making a good decision cheaply is better than making a perfect decision at great cost. These short term decisions about what to do with your day follow a very common pattern. If you think about them a little bit, your decisions get much better. Even a rough understanding of the consequences is a lot better than no understanding. As you spend more time and energy on the decision, you can ferret out some of the less obvious implications which sometimes matter and sometimes don’t. But the more you understand, the less likely the new information is going to change your decision.