People pay me to help them make decisions—this myth makes ‘your life worse’

Most people think taking your time to make a big decision is essential to making the best call. Haste equals regret, right?

Not in my experience.

I’m a decision coach who helps people make one decision — big or small — in a single session. I’ve helped people decide whether to move abroad, change careers, get divorced, or have kids. I even helped someone pick what color to paint their kitchen.

I’ve worked with more than 500 clients, and they all have one thing in common: They take way too long to make their decision. What they don’t realize is that this actually makes decisions harder — and your life worse.

Avoid this common trap

I’ve had clients come to me for help with decisions they’ve been mulling over for years. One typical example is a couple with kids trying to decide whether to stay put and commit to the city they live in, maybe trying to buy a house, or to move closer to family, usually to one of their hometowns.

The decision gets exacerbated by months and years of discussions, debates, and pros and cons lists. Once you spend that long making a decision, you’ve exhausted every tiny advantage and disadvantage of each side. You’ve gone from “the schools are so much better in Columbus” to “but we love the calzone from our local pizza place here in Chicago; we’d never get calzones that good there!” and back again.

A lengthy decision means too many details have been added to the list, which turns into an unwieldy mass of tiny pros and infinitesimal cons. When you spend so long agonizing and analyzing, you become acutely aware of all the things you’d be giving up by choosing one thing over the other. And that makes the decision way harder than it needs to be.

In the meantime, your life is demonstrably worse. You’re spending so much of your brain space and energy deciding — in the shower or lying awake at 3 a.m. It’s draining!

Many of my clients are so exhausted by it that they get on the phone with me and say something like, “I’m so sick of thinking and talking about this!”

How to speed things up

I’m a big proponent of the idea that making any decision is better than making no decision. If you make a bad decision, fine, it happens, but you won’t have lost months of your life debating it, too.

To decide faster, take three simple steps:

Set a decision deadline. What would be an appropriate date by which to have made this decision, based on outside deadlines and how much time you think you need?
Cut it in half. If you think you need six months, make it three. If it’s a month, make it two weeks. If it’s a week, make it four days. The quality of the decision you make will be the same, I promise. We tend to overestimate the amount of time we need to make a high-quality decision. The truth is that we spend a lot of that time going over familiar ground, over-researching, and soliciting so many opinions that we end up more confused than ever.
Ask yourself: “What really matters?” You can answer this by making a list of values or restricting yourself to the three most important things to consider in this decision. The most relevant factors in any decision are top of mind; they’ll come to you right away. Look at each option in relation to those top three factors. Which one checks more boxes?

There’s an opportunity cost to taking all those extra months, weeks, and days to make a single decision.

What if you got all that time and energy and brain space back? And instead of using it to make that one choice, you put it toward steps that could make whichever path you choose a success?

Nell Wulfhart has been helping people make big (and small!) decisions since 2013. Her clients have included politicians, hedge fund managers, Netflix executives, poets, parents, med students, and many more. You can listen in on her coaching sessions on her podcast, The Decision Coach. Find her at decisioncoach.com.

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