We all know how hard it can be to make decisions, especially in the moment. Picture this: you just got out of seeing a movie with your friends and everyone is hungry. You’re in a pretty active area so there are a lot of choices, but no one is familiar enough with the location to know what’s around. What do you do next?
Most of the time this situation has three outcomes. The first is that the group looks to one primary decision maker to make the call, and that person usually ends up directing the group to the nearest best option. The second results in disbanding the group and everyone going off to do their own thing. Lastly, and this is usually the most common, the group members take out their phones and start searching for a place the group can agree to go to.
A lot of time is wasted in this. Between all the group deliberations, the searching, and the wondering if you’d be happier going solo the rest of the evening, there’s a ton to process.
The cognitive load from all of this mental juggling makes it hard to decide. But what’s going on here? Let’s look at the steps you take when it comes to figuring out what to do.
When we try to get an idea of what we want to do, we prioritize the order in which we seek the information needed to make a decision.
It starts with having an idea, but this is rare. Most of us don’t know what we want to do. Occasionally your instincts will take over. For example, you’ll be very hungry and the first restaurant you see looks great. Serendipity can also play a role. Sometimes you’re just in the right place and the solution seems obvious.
Usually, the idea doesn’t just come to you and you must rely on your internal list. Your internal list is your memory. It’s how you store and recall ideas. It’s organized in a way similar to a to-do list. We can use restaurants again as an example. If I asked you to think of a place to get dinner tonight you’d probably first think about dinner restaurants. Dinner restaurants is a list you keep in your head of all the restaurants you know of that serve dinner. It’s likely a really long list. So you think about what you’re hungry for. Pizza sounds good so you filter your dinner restaurants list down to a pizza restaurants list. This could even include information on your list of lunch places too. If these lists are too long you may repeat this process a few more times. Hopefully, you find a good idea amongst the options, but what if you can’t?
Once we’ve exhausted our internal resources we begin to look for answers beyond ourselves. We start to seek out suggestions. This comes in the form of asking others virtually or face to face. You might poll the group and ask if there are any ideas, or you might text someone who has expertise in a particular area. The most important criteria for suggestions are how long it takes to get the suggestion, how much you trust the source, and that source’s knowledgeability. Suggestions also must come from a human source. Suggestion algorithms and their related apps align more closely with the bottom of the pyramid. If your immediate sources fail you, you move on to the final two levels of the pyramid.
We’re smart enough to know a good idea when we hear it. If the idea is good enough we’ll even write it down. Maybe you read a great review online and you bookmarked the page for reference later, or maybe you scribbled a book title on a napkin for a suggestion you received during brunch. No matter the case, most of us worry we’ll forget useful bits of information (and we do) so we write them down. If you’re particularly organized you’ll keep an external list of some kind. This list could be in a to-do app, on a notepad, or even in an email. The point is that it serves as an extension of your internal list except that it’s easier to remember. The organization and filtering that an external list demands can vary, but it makes up for it in its usefulness and in how much time it will save you.
If you don’t have an external list to fall back on it gets a lot harder. At this point, if you or your immediate contacts are out of ideas, you’re going to have to search for a solution. This used to mean wandering around until you found something, but technology has changed all of that. Thanks to the internet we have access to more information than we can reasonably process, and it’s all right there when we resort to searching for some idea of what to do. In our first article, we examined the pitfalls of modern day information abundance and our habit of falling into the analysis paralysis trap when we wrestle with too much information. The truth is out there, but you’d be surprised how long it takes to find it (and then how long it takes to decide on it). Search is extremely time-consuming (even with Google’s help), and should be the last resort when trying to decide quickly.
Finally, a note on trust. Trust plays an important part through the entire pyramid. The more you trust the faster you decide. At the top of the pyramid is you, and you don’t trust anyone more than you do yourself. The farther down you go the less trust there is. It’s why suggestion algorithms rank at the bottom with search and not with friend suggestions near the top. Trust is a major component in determining how quickly you decide and how comfortable you are with that choice.
We can only get by on immediate ideas and our internal lists for so long. Most of the time we build our decisions on suggestions, external lists, and search.
But why should you have to juggle all three? An optimal choice would be to focus on your external lists (you should make one if you haven’t already).
Why? Because external lists combine the information of human suggestions and search with the structure of how we quickly process information. It’s easier all-around.
Your external list is the place to write down the great ideas you don’t want to risk losing amongst your internal list items. It’s a central repository for you and your friends to pool information ahead of time. It’s also a superior way to save ideas you come across online instead of using bookmarks, and far faster to parse than searching the web. When it comes to short-term decision making, the only thing better than an external list is already knowing the answer.
With that in mind, let’s revise the pyramid.
Admittedly, there is some preparation needed to make the most of an external list. You need to be proactive about saving good ideas to it. Building that habit doesn’t take too long, and the time it saves is well worth it.
So the next time you have to decide on what to do or where to go next, use a list. You’ll spend more time doing and less time searching.
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