Effective decision-making starts with understanding the gravity of your choices. It can be as simple as picking out a hat, choosing a new hairstyle, or planning your next tattoo [1]. Or, it might involve assessing decisions based on their importance and urgency [2], or contemplating potential regrets and working backwards to minimize them [3].
Or is it?
We are naturally decision-making beings. From deciding whether to wake up or sleep a bit more, to choosing lunch, selecting a university, accepting a job offer, or choosing a life partner, we face decisions of different magnitudes and impacts. These decisions are unequal; their reversibility and long-term effects differ. Thus, heuristics and rules of thumb serve as valuable cognitive shortcuts, enabling your more deliberate thinking processes to slow down, prioritize, and wisely allocate mental energy. This approach helps prevent wasting brainpower on minor issues instead of significant ones that could influence your life’s trajectory.
Yet, a crucial and often overlooked aspect of decision-making is the urgency and necessity of making decisions. The worst procrastination isn’t delaying actions but postponing decisions. The burden of decision-making is universal, and deferring it to another time or person adversely affects everything and everyone we value. While our abilities to think and analyze are powerful…
