How to Get Your Life Back (for only Twenty-Five Cents)!
Make up your mind faster and stop holding up the line!
Your time is valuable, and our brains are wired to be little more than decision making machines — this or that, good or bad, edible or rotten — and it’s served us well as a species, but we have a problem; sometimes we’re just plain indecisive.
Not making a decision about something is also a decision, and sometimes it’s not the right one to be made; so when you’ve come to a point where a decision needs to be made and you can’t make up your mind, but you know that there’s very little actual consequence to either choice of action, try this:
Flip a coin.
Save Time by Playing Dice
When I first heard this tip, I tried using a d20 instead (because I’m a geek), but the approach is still the same. When you roll the d20 to cover a decision,one of two things will happen:
- A decision will be made by the die (and you stop waffling over the decision)
- You’ll decide, in the time it takes to actually roll the die, what it is you really want to do and will then disregard the decision made by the die.
Either way, you’ve just committed to making the decision.
That’s it!
The simplest thing this system does is that it takes the time you would have spent on a fairly trivial decision and allows you to reclaim that time for other things — which may seem like a tiny thing, but if you think about how often you spend time on decisions you know are trivial in the long run (e.g. “Should I order tea or coffee? Is now a good time to open up my RSS reader and try to get caught up? Should I bring my Kindle with me today when I go out?”), you realize that there’s a massive benefit to just making up your mind.
Sure, you may not be saving USEFUL time by making these decisions, but the logic is still sound — less time spent worrying about decisions you ultimately know don’t matter means you can focus on stuff that matters more, or at least is stuff that matters more to you and that you enjoy doing.
Why not just flip a coin?
Having a coin on hand to flip makes sense at first — you get a clear yes/no answer, you’re forcing your brain to still make the same decisions about whether to actually listen to the coin or not, and for most decisions (e.g. “Do I want to get an ice cream cone”, “Should I stop by the bookstore”, etc.), it’ll work just fine because you’re just looking for a binary answer.
There’s still some downsides, though:
- A coin is still currency you might need to spend. No vending machine (and very few cashiers) will accept a d20 as currency, so if you have a d20 on you before, you’re bound to still have it later.
- A d20 can handle non-binary decisions as well as binary ones — say you’re trying to decide between three or four equally plausible decisions (like a flavor or a color) — a single d20 roll can handle the problem where two or three coin flips might be necessary.
- You might mix up your “lucky coin” with other coins, and a d20 is pretty distinctive no matter how many other dice are involved.
Yes, There’s an App for That.
Eventually, I migrated to using a coin flip app instead, which seems like a step backwards: after all, you’re still just getting a binary answer to your problems. You’re not changing the decision space for using a coin vs. using a d20, you’re just digitizing it.
But at least now I didn’t have to carry around a d20!
The d20 requires a table or other flat surface, and can still get lost — whereas an app won’t have this problem, and can be flipped quickly and silently while standing in line at Starbucks making up your mind. And the app exists within your smartphone, which you’re carrying around anyway, so it’s less stuff to keep up with.
Still trying to decide if this is worth doing? Give it a try for a couple of days, or while you’re poring over whether or not it’s worth buying that next eBook on Kindle for a couple bucks — I wouldn’t recommend using it for anything expensive, but for cheap purchases it’s far more efficient to take a risk and see if it’s useful than to worry about saving $3 by seriously considering it for a few minutes.
Or you could flip for it.
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N E X T ► In Preparation for Your Flight
