Don't Overthink It: 5 Tips for Daily Decision-Making

 "What made you so efficient?" The answer is simple. “I make decisions.” We make hundreds of decisions every day – from what to focus our energy on to what to eat for dinner. Becoming a better decision-maker would be the fastest route to improve your daily productivity.

There are no hard and fast rules for decision-making. There are, however, a number of interesting tendencies that play into how we decide, which we should all be aware of.

Here’s 5 tips for daily decision-making:

1. Satisficers vs Maximizers.

Satisficers are those who make a decision or take action once their criteria are met. That doesn’t mean their criteria is low; but as soon as they find the car, the hotel, or the pasta sauce that has the qualities they want, they’re satisfied.

Maximizers want to make the optimal decision. So even if they see a bicycle or a photographer that would seem to meet their requirements, they can’t make a decision until after they’ve examined every option, so they know they’re making the best possible choice.


Satisficers tend to be happier than maximizers. Maximizers must spend a lot more time and energy to reach a decision, and they’re often anxious about whether they are making the best choice. However, more information does not necessarily lead to peace of mind or better decision-making.

In other words, gathering additional information always comes at a cost. Once you have that information, make the choice and move on.

2. How less can be more.

We’re designed to make smart snap decisions based on limited information.

"Take the best" means that you calculate only as much as you absolutely have to; then you stop and do something else. So, for example, if there are 10 pieces of information that you might weigh in a thorough decision, but one piece of information is clearly more important than the others, then that one piece of information is often enough to make a choice. You don't need the rest; other details just complicate things and waste time.

In other words, we are designed to process information so quickly that “rapid cognition” – decisions that spring from hard thinking based on sound experience – can feel more instinctive than scientific. Trust your gut!

3. The three kinds of intuition.

In the creative and business worlds, you hear a lot of talk about intuition, and “trusting your gut.” But what does that really mean? It’s less simple than you might think. Columbia Business School professor William Duggan believes that there are three different types of intuition:

1) Ordinary intuition: just a feeling, a gut instinct.
2) Expert intuition: snap judgments, when you instantly recognize something familiar, the way a tennis pro knows where the ball will go from the arc and speed of the opponent’s racket. Always fast, but only works in familiar situations.
3) Strategic intuition: not a vague feeling but a clear thought, like ordinary intuition. That flash of insight you had last night might solve a problem that’s been on your mind for a month.Always slow, but works for new situations, which is when you need your best ideas.

In other words, this difference is crucial, because expert intuition can be the enemy of strategic intuition. We should trust our expert intuition (based on experience) when making choices about familiar problems. But when we need a break-through solution, we shouldn’t be too quick to jump to conclusions. That is, we must off your expert intuition and disconnec the old dots.

4. Trust experience.
We use the cognitive biases when making decisions and do not make very rational decisions in most cases, nor are we particularly good at predicting what will make us happy. If we don’t have the knowledge or experience to make a decision, the best course of action is to just ask someone else.


The differences between you and other people are so unimportant that you would do better predicting how you are going to like something simply by asking one randomly chosen person how they like it.


In other words, if you’re wrestling with a difficult decision, consult a friend or colleague who’s been in your situation before. Their insight will likely be significantly more valuable than almost any research.

5. Choosing your battles.

Some decisions, like how to handle a dicey client situation, are worth mulling over. Others, like deciding what brand of dental floss you buy, are not.We are constantly bullied into feeling like trivial decisions are incredibly important:

The modern marketplace is a conspiracy to trick the mind into believing that our most basic choices are actually extremely significant. Companies try to convince us that only their toothpaste will clean our teeth, or that only their detergent will remove the stains from our clothes… Why does the average drug store contain 55 floss alternatives and more than 350 kinds of toothpaste? While all these products are designed to cater to particular consumer niches, they end up duping the brain into believing that picking a floss is a high-stakes game, since it’s so damn hard. And so we get mired in decision-making quicksand.

In other works, ask yourself if this decision is really that meaningful. If it’s not, stop obsessing over it, and just make a call! Don't bother yourself by hesitating as your time is WAY more important and valuable than the toothpaste.