I’m pretty much the worst at making decisions.  The problem is most of the time it’s not about important things.  It’s about what movie to watch or what to have for dinner.  Ultimately, I feel like most of the time it’s because I fear that I am not utilizing my time (or money) in the best manner possible.  If I pick a crappy movie, then I feel like I’ve just wasted 2 hours of my life.  If I’m not satisfied with my dinner choice then I’ve just wasted money on a meal that didn’t make me happy.

Sometimes I’m even worse about making bigger decisions, especially when it comes to my business.  If you make the wrong decisions with your business you could lose clients, really waste some money or worst case scenario, go out of business.  Most of the time we even procrastinate about small decisions when it comes to our business.  Once I was putting together a ‘social media package‘ and it took me about 4 hours to decide whether I should buy goingsocialnj.com or simplysocialnj.com (which I’ve let lapse since writing this.)  It was totally illogical that it took me so long to decide which one to buy and I couldn’t get any further (with advertising, logos, etc.) until I figured that out!  I was so angry at myself for not being able to make the decision.  BTW, I bought both domains just because I got pissed off and couldn’t decide.

Fear is the worst, but we’ve talked about the fear of failing before.  Today, I found a great little article (or ‘Lifehack’) about ways to overcome the fear of making decisions…or just helping you to make decisions in general.  The tips come Lifehacker in an article called “Four Tricks to Help You Make Any Difficult Decision.”  The ‘Four Tricks’ consist of:

  • Pretend Like You’re Advising A Friend
  • Limit the Amount of Information You Take In
  • Empower Your Inner Contrarian and Reverse Your Assumptions
  • Spreadsheet It Out

Too add to Lifehackers list there was always one I always liked that was a little easier, and really good for smaller decisions (and I talked about it over here):

There’s an old lifehack that if you’re torn between two decisions you should flip a coin.  Not that you should leave fate up to chance, but in the moments the coin is flipping in the air you (more times than not) realize what side you want the coin to flip on.  That’s the same kind of mentality I usually have with the ‘go down with the ship.’