Run a small business and you probably feel like you make dozens of decisions every day. Whether to cut a quality corner, or miss a ship date. Whether to respond to a customer complaint, or hope the problem goes away. Whether to address an employee’s behavior, or kick that can down the road.
Then there are all the personal decisions. Whether to get up and going, or hit the snooze button. Whether to ditch the food you packed, or go out for lunch instead. Whether to keep grinding, or work out.
None of those are actually decisions, though, since you already know you should do so. Nearly everything you “decide” already has an answer.
Quality problem? Fix it. Customer complaint? Respond. Underperforming employee? Address the behavior now; a performance issue takes care of itself.
The same is true for personal “decisions.” The nine minutes of sleep you get after hitting the snooze button isn’t restorative sleep; you’re better off setting your alarm for nine minutes later. (Or going to bed earlier.) The food you packed is — or should be — an integral part of your healthy lifestyle; going out for lunch when you didn’t plan to is almost never better for you. Work out? Exercise can be your physical (and mental) competitive advantage.
That’s the beauty of processes and routines. Rules aren’t restrictive. Rules are liberating, because rules free you up from having to make “decisions.” Over time, those actions become habits. Then you definitely don’t need to make a decision, because habits are effortless. (In both good and bad ways, obviously.) Instead of wasting mental energy and willpower on “choosing,” all you have to do is act.
As Jeff Bezos says, you don’t get paid to make thousands of decisions every day. You get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions.
As Bezos wrote in Fast Company:
You need to be thinking two or three years in advance, and if you are, then why do I need to make a hundred decisions today? If I make three good decisions a day, that’s enough, and they should just be as high quality as I can make them. Warren Buffett says he’s good if he makes three good decisions a year, and I really believe that.
Clearly, there’s a huge difference between making three good decisions per day, and three good decisions per year. Yet that difference is also easy to explain.
Launching a startup, like starting anything from a relatively blank slate, requires making seemingly countless decisions. Infrastructure, branding, pricing strategies, marketing strategies… everything is up in the air. It’s impossible to “work in the future” when you haven’t figured out the present.
But once you’ve made a decision, you no longer have to “decide.” Barring evidence that decision was wrong and needs to be revisited, all you have to do is act. With time, the number of decisions you need to make every day should rapidly decline.
Which means you can focus all that mental energy on making strategic rather than tactical decisions. You can focus on making decisions that set the course for the next months, or even years. To launch a new product line, or not. To open a new location, or not.
To take your life — health, education, relationships, etc. — in new directions, or not.
Making fewer decisions (better yet, constantly revisiting fewer decisions) frees you up to think about the things that will make the biggest difference in your professional and personal life. Think of it that way, and you really don’t need to make more than three good decisions a year.
Especially if those decisions help you become the person you want to be, and to build the life you really want to live.
—Jeff Haden
This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister publication, Inc.
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