Tag: “Decision Making”

Analysis paralysis is a form of procrastination. Surely you have suffered from it more than once. It’s the term used to describe those situations in which you are thinking of something over and over again but you never make any decision.

Jason Fried says in his book Rework that in Basecamp, company in which he is co-founder and CEO, one of the abilities that they are interested in when hiring people is their writing ability, no matter if they are sales people, programmers, or designers. The reason is simple: Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. Good writers know how to communicate, they make things easy to understand and they know when to leave out the unnecessary.

At any specific moment throughout the day, how do you decide what are you going to do next? It could be that you are still used to defining your priorities by assigning a number to each of your pending tasks so that later on you can choose the one with the highest number (even though that number was assigned 20 days ago, when the situation was completely different to the actual one). Working with these type of priorities, though usual, it’s a very poor self-management strategy.

All of us, some more than others, are victims of the default effect. When we have a lot of options to choose from, among which there’s a predetermined one—a default choice—most of us just go with the standard option. In other words, we choose not to choose.

“Satisficing” is a term that the economist Herbert Simon coined in 1956. It’s actually a cross between the words “satisfying” and “sufficing”, and comes to say that when we have to make a decision, we generally don’t waste much time evaluating all possible options, we just choose the first reasonable option we find.