Minimize the number of times you make decisions, every day
I’ve found this to be highly useful, but something few people talk about - largely because people don’t even realize they are doing it.
Decision making is one of our most mentally taxing activities and can add to undue stress. Most of us don’t realize how many decisions we end up making in a day, and it is an unnoticed drain on bodily resources.
We face decisions from the innocuous “what do I wear today?”, to the more pertinent “what do I do now?”, to the impactful “where do I take my life next?”. I have gone through these feelings of being frozen, and immobile, because you’re stuck with deciding what do next.
How do you minimize the number of decisions you make every day? You bunch together similar types of decisions in dedicated time slots.
How do you resolve “what do I wear today”? Spend 30 minutes once a week to decide, and organize your wardrobe. How do you resolve “what do I do now?”. Spend 60 minutes at the beginning of the week to decide, and put it on your calendar. How do you resolve “where do I take my life next”? Spend dedicated time once a quarter to meditate on this question.
This can be literally extended to everything you do. Should you reply to a just arrived email or not? Dedicate time every day to decide on email behaviour. Should you eat something or not? Decide at the beginning of the week. And so on.
What this allows us to do is become incredibly productive. We get focused on the action of the task, rather than the inaction of decision making. There are obviously decisions that need to be taken within a certain period of time, but those are few. The regular decisions go from being instinctive and emotional to being well thought out and objective.
-Aviral Bhatnagar
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