Six science-backed techniques to help you make hard decisions
The typical adult makes 35,000 decisions each day.
If you do the math (and account for seven hours of sleep), that’s about 2,000 decisions every hour — or one choice every two seconds.
Most decisions are actually micro-choices, like clicking a link or taking a sip of coffee. But some choices feel momentous.
An internal tug-of-war indicates that something big is at stake. You sense that the choice could significantly affect your happiness, freedom, pride, or personal fulfillment.
If you’re running a business, there are even more decisions to make — and many are critical to the health of your company.
The good news? Science is continually discovering new and better ways to make tough decisions.
As Lea Heinrich writes in the New York Times, “over the past few decades, a growing multidisciplinary field of research — spanning areas as diverse as cognitive science, management theory and literary studies — have given us a set of tools that we can use to make better choices.”
Unfortunately, none of these tools can actually make the decision for you.
“They are prompts, hacks, nudges,” says Heinrich.
“They’re intended to help you see…
