Making decisions
Once you know where you want to go, what your concrete goal and vision of the future is — see using time for more on this- you will have to start making decisions about a lot of things. In fact everything you do during a day is the result of a decision.
Unfortunately the majority of our decisions aren't made consciously. This is an energy saving mechanism our brain has evolved because the part of the brain we use for planning, structuring and anything we do consciously- our prefrontal cortex- is the most energy hungry part of our brain. In contrast, the parts of the brain making up the subconscious developed to be super-efficient and very fast, but — unfortunately without much of our control.
It seems that we are left with around 5% of decisions that we can make consciously in order to move ourselves towards the goals we have set up for ourselves — unless we can convince our subconscious to do the work without our conscious being involved, but this is a topic too large for this post.
So, how can we best make use of the limited resource of decision making? It turns out, there is a very simple process that supports you in doing just that:
(1) As a first step, you move the question you need to decide on through the "Eisenhower Matrix". This is a very easy matrix consisting of four quadrants between two axis:
(2) As a second step you ask yourself if the action can be postponed. If it can, put it into a system that you trust 100% to remind you in the right moment to revisit the task. At this point it might be necessary to take action or you can postpone it again or in some cases you can eliminate it.
(3) If it needs to be done now, ask yourself whether this is a repetitive task. For each task there is a threshold at which it is more useful to spend time to automate the task than to actually perform it.
(4) Sometimes it is possible to delegate the task and/or the automation of the task to someone or something else. Whatever is better done by someone other than you should be done by them because that gives you free time to focus on the important things.
(5) If the task is still on your list, ask yourself once more whether it is really important and valuable to do it right now. If not to to step (2), otherwise do it.
The goal is to get rid of all or at least the majority of the tasks that are not in the field "important and not urgent". For whatever you do, you should strive to only work on things in this category.
Just sticking to these few rules will have a massive impact on your productivity, but as soon as other people are involved, things become a little bit more tricky. For this i can offer you the tool we created to save our lives — literally by stopping to waste 50% of our waking time in meetings.
We call it untwist and it helps us to untangle all the open ends and discussions meetings usually create and turn them into a straight thread to success.
I always love hearing from people about their experience regarding meetings, productivity and happiness — feel free to email me at thomas@untwist.io !
