Have you ever made a bad decision that had cost you more than you expected? Sure you have; we all have. As a human, we make a lot of decisions in a day. In one article I read (1) we make upwards of 35000 decisions a day, most of them as standard or autonomic actions. Our decisions not only affect us personally, but sometimes those people around us too. As a business owner, our decisions can affect our clients, employees, contractors, suppliers, and many other peoples and businesses.
Our simple, daily decisions, such as what to eat, whether to hit the snooze button again, or what lane to drive in on the highway, are routine, and help us manage our days. The more complex decision, such as when to launch a new product line, develop new programs, what to spend your time or money on, when to change directions, who to hire or fire, what emails to respond to first, take more time and energy to create the focus needed to make good decisions.
Decisions help us choose between options that are available to us. We weigh these options on value to our lives, in some aspect. Choosing between packing a lunch or eating out may have two different values to us. They can be measured by the quantity of time we have to spend or the costs we are willing to spend at lunch.
How do we decide on how to budget our time for lunch, or for any other decision we need to make? Choosing between priorities can sometimes be difficult & have unexpected or more costly results.
Start with evaluating what is truly important to you and all the options available to you.
Options Available
In our example of taking a bagged lunch versus eating out, we started with these two options, but there are other options available to us, such as:
- eat at local fast food restaurant
- order food for pick-up
- order food for delivery
- eat out at a nice restaurant
- go home for lunch
- go to park with bagged lunch
- eat bagged lunch at your desk
- eat bagged lunch in the lunch room
- eat delivered lunch at your desk
- eat delivered lunch in the lunch room
- etc.
My evaluation had two main criteria that was important to me, the amount of time I have at lunch and the amount of money I have to spend, so I was looking for different options that I would have that give me different costs or time savings.
Note that not all of the options may be good options for you (e.g. going home for lunch, or eating at a park) but it is important to list as many options as possible, even ones that are options you do not want to pick. ‘Non-ideal-options’ help you better rank your comparisons.
Value to You
Now you list all the things that are valuable to you about how and where you eat lunch.
- need to reduce spending
- reduced time
- extremely busy days
- enjoy your lunch
- need time to unwind in the day
To do an evaluation, I would put my options and values in a matrix, with the options available across the top, and the values down the left.
Start on the first row, and give a ranking out of 10, where 0=NOT GOOD and 10=Best Situation.
You will notice, in my example below, that in row one (need to reduce spending) I have given the first 3 options the same rating. For me, ordering out costs more, so it is already not a 10. In this case, they all felt like the same value, in the sense of ‘spending’, to me.
For the forth column, going home for lunch costs me less than eating out but more than bringing my lunch. This is reflected as a 7 in the “need to reduce spending” row, because it cost me in gas to drive there, where bringing a bagged lunch ranks higher in my “reduced spending”.
Now tally all your columns. When you tally all your columns, you will have a better idea of how your options compare. I highlighted the highest 4 options. In general, to reduce costs and time, I should stick with bringing a bagged lunch and eating it at work. Other close options, may allow for some future variation, but if I want to stay in budget, I should not go to a nice restaurant at lunch.
Obviously you are not going to do this for a lunch decision, but hopefully this gave you some insights into how to make better decision. This process allows you a deeper inquiry into why you want to choose one over the other.
And, as a final note, when all things are equal, go with your gut.
“Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.” – Malcolm Gladwell
(1) Reference: https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/stretching-theory/201809/how-many-decisions-do-we-make-each-day 35000 decisions/day
This article is 100% original content – The articles you read in this blog are 100% created by Barb Stuhlemmer, not by AI.
Leave a Reply