How can one make Decisions efficiently without over-thinking?

by: Mahatma KPosted on:

Do you know why people like Steve Jobs (Late), and Mark Zuckerberg prefer to be in a pretty standard outfit every day?

Despite being multi-billionaires and under constant coverage by the international media, why do they ignore their appearance? 

Well, the answer is – To avoid ‘Decision Fatigue’. They choose not to spend any time deciding on their outfits every day.

Interesting? There could be a lot more reasons like branding and all that. But Decision fatigue is a critical aspect.

Let’s define ‘Decision Fatigue’: Over the course of a day, the more and more decisions you make, the ability to make decisions decreases, resulting in a fatigue-like state that hinders productivity.

Making decisions requires a significant amount of cognitive resources in your brain. As you continue to make more decisions throughout the day, your brain gets overloaded, resulting in fatigue. This is why you may feel tired after making numerous decisions during the day.

For busy executives, their work requires making decisions throughout the day, both big and small. As a result, they often prioritize using their cognitive resources for important decisions rather than expending energy on relatively minor decisions.

Not just for them, this can happen to us as well and I’m sure most of us share this experience in some form. So what do we do in that case? We either end up procrastinating or randomly selecting one to avoid bearing the cognitive load.

Now that we understand the problem, let’s deep dive to learn if there is an effortless and structured way to make decisions quickly and efficiently without placing an excessive cognitive load.

When you search for “Decision Making Frameworks” on Google, you will come across a wide variety of resources that can help enhance your decision-making skills. However, I have personally found the approach used by my current organization to be incredibly effective, and frequently use it in both my personal and professional life.

5-Step Decision-Making framework:

  1. Classify the type of Decision
    1. Category-1: Low Importance and Reversible. Decision Timeline is 15-30 min.
    2. Category 2: Low Importance and irreversible. Decision timeline is 7-10 days.
    3. Category-3: High Importance and reversible. Decision timeline is 30-45 days.
    4. Category 4: High Importance and irreversible. The decision timeline is one quarter.
  2. Define your pure requirements
  3. Rank your requirements as per the relative priority
  4. Compare these against your possible options and assign a score.
  5. Compute the Aggregate score for each option and pick the option that tops the score.

While steps #2 – #5 might sound obvious, you might wonder what is #1 doing here. Well, the best practice followed by the best decision-makers across the world is to timebox decisions. Unless you have a defined timeframe, procrastination will kick in and do the magic.

I recently read an article in HBR titled “4 Things That Set Successful CEOs Apart”. The article says that great CEOs realize that a wrong decision may be better than no decision at all. That important it is to decide rather than postpone it.

Let’s take an example to understand this better. 

Say, you are planning to buy a car. Let’s see how we can employ this Decision framework.

  1. Classify the type of Decision – Buying a car is a big decision for most of us. This could be a Category-3 decision and you should ideally make this decision in less than a month. Category-3 because it is of high importance but reversible decision. Reversible because you can resell or exchange your Car later if you want to, of course at a depreciated price.
  2. Defining my pure requirements here.
    1. Fuel Efficient
    2. 5-Star NCAP rating
    3. Comfort
    4. Affordability
    5. Low Maintenance
    6. Resale Value
    7. Service Network
    8. Looks
    9. Long Drive comfort for a family of 4
  3. Ranking the requirements as per the relative priority
    1. Fuel Efficient
    2. 5-Star NCAP rating
    3. Low Maintenance
    4. Comfort
    5. Affordability
    6. Long Drive comfort for a family of 4
    7. Service Network
    8. Resale Value
    9. Looks
  4. Comparing the above requirements against your possible options and assigning a score.
    1. Maruti WagonR –put a normalized score against each of the requirements listed above
    2. Maruti Dzire
    3. Tata Nexon
    4. Tata Tiago
    5. Skoda Rapid
    6. Hyundai i10
  5. Compute the Aggregate score for each option level and pick the option that tops the score. Make the decision and proceed further.

All good until here, how do we know if the decision taken is right or wrong?

In this context, let us remind ourselves of a great quote by Mr. Ratan Tata. It goes like this:

” I don’t believe in taking right decisions. I take decisions and try to make them right”.

Therefore, we must rely on our judgement to the best of our ability, utilizing all available information to make an informed decision. The process is iterative and with practice, we can improve our ability to make well-informed decisions.