Day 16: The Double-Edged Sword of Too Much Choice
Having choices and options is generally a good thing.
After all, in the movies when the villian says “you’re all out of options, pal” that normally means things aren’t going too well for the protagonist.
Choice means opportunity, it means variety.
But it can also lead to choice paralysis, and that’s what I’ve been dealing with the last couple of days.
Choice paralysis, as I’m sure you know, means having so many options on your plate you don’t know what to do, so you freeze. You’re paralyzed by not knowing which path to take, which door to open, or which pill to swallow…
With this 100 To Launch challenge of raising £100,000 in 100 days, and the impending Kickstarter launch of Geco Hub, our compact storage hub, to go along with this, I’ve got a lot to do. After quite a bit of planning and brainstorming, I had a lot of options on what exactly I should be doing at any given moment too.
So the inevitable happened, I faltered.
A day or so back, although I was getting stuff done, I wasn’t being nearly as productive as I know I can be. No amount of coffee seemed to solve the problem. Then, I noticed the choice paralysis for what it was, and decided to do something about it.
The solution for me? It was deceptively simple really…
Just choose one thing and do it from start to finish.
No juggling of multiple tasks, no weighing up of pros and cons. Just looking at the to-do list, taking a minute to pick something impactful, and going ahead and getting it done.
If you’re ever seized by choice paralysis I can highly recommend the book The One Thing by Gary Keller. It’s a short book you can read in an afternoon and, although the whole premise of the book is laid out in the title (as with a lot of these self-help business books), I found it useful nonetheless. I read it a while back, but the lessons I learnt came into play here.
So, after getting out of the choice paralysis what have I done? Two things mainly…
1. Set up Facebook Adverts
I’ve set an experiment going with Facebook adverts, spreading the word about Geco Hub and seeing who might be interested. At the moment I’m targeting people:
- Who are interested in Everyday Carry (EDC) items, they need somewhere to store them after all
- Who are interested in at-home organising (Marie Kondo etc.)
- Who live in dense cities (and therefore are more likely to rent and live in more compact quarters, perfect for Geco Hub)
- Students living in dorms (Geco Hub doesn’t need screws to install and you’re not allowed to do DIY in student accommodation… check)
I’ll report back in a few days on how this goes.
2. Behance Project
Behance is a global platform for creatives to share design projects they’ve worked on.
I noticed that since I posted Geco Hub 1.0 on Behance several years ago it had been viewed by several thousand people (mostly in the months following publication), so I opted to create a “project” on Behance for Geco Hub 2.o, sharing some of the renderings I’ve done to date. It’s early days but I’m hoping this will spark the interest of a few people browsing the site.
Here’s the project, have a look and give it a like if you do — indeed — like it.
The 100 To Launch Instagram account is almost at 20 followers! If you haven’t already head on over and follow @100ToLaunch for daily updates in fancily-filtered-photo-format.
Let’s see if we can reach 20 by the end of the week…
Originally published at https://100tolaunch.com the home of the 100 To Launch Challenge, a personal challenge to raise £100,000 in 100 days.
