One aspect of life that eats into the time that we may have scheduled for other tasks is the process of decision making. Some of these decisions are small and trivial and have minimal effect on our lives and some of them are big decisions that have a bigger role to play in the larger perspective of life. Whether small or big, each of these decisions takes time and mind power to evaluate and process. One faces these myriad of choices at every step in a day. We face options as soon as we wake up. Should you relax in the bed for a few more minutes or should you get up immediately? More options once you are out of the bed. Should you have cereal for breakfast or an egg? Once you are on the road, you need to decide whether to take your normal route or take a detour and pick up your dry cleaned clothes on the way to work? At work, obviously there are thousands of work related decisions that one needs to make.
You will realize that some of these smaller decisions come extremely naturally to you. This happens because you have been doing certain things as part of your routine and they become a part and parcel of your life. You also know that these decisions will not have a major impact on your life and therefore are able to decide fast.
But what about the other decisions that you may think are more critical? Should you take up the new job offer? Should you speak to your boss and ask him for a more competitive job profile? Should you marry this guy? All these decisions have the potential to change the course of your life in a dramatic manner, which is why we tend to spend too much time delving over the various options that we have. The information over load at times makes things worse and does not help us by providing us with options galore. The millions of possibilities confuse us and do not aid us in decision making.
As we grow older, we feel that the number of decisions that we need to take seems to be increasing day by day. The reason why it happens is because as we grow, we tend to take more and more responsibilities and thus are expected to make more and more decisions at every step.
What we need to do in order to make decisions within our schedule of things is to ensure that we are not fickle minded and have a process by which we eliminate options that are not apt. Once the elimination process is complete, we have a lesser number of options to review. Then we can list down the pros and cons of these options and take a call. It is only natural that each option will have some cons attached to it and if we delve too much on them and do not take any decision, we will just ensure that time passes by without any action. The thing to do is to accept the cons of the option that seems best, decide and move to the next stage.
This option of evaluation should be done for decisions that have an impact in our life. Taking so long to make decisions that have minimal impact will be wastage of time. So don’t be fickle minded, evaluate options methodically and get to the action stage because action is what will get you results. The path is only as important as you want it to be and there are various paths that will lead to the same goal. So make your choice fast and act!
Vishal P. Rao share his insights and tips on holistic living at Relishing Life.
