At the moment of every day I must decide what I am going to do the next moment; and no one can make this decision for me, or take my place in this.

                Jose Ortega Y Gasset, Philosopher and Essayist

Given options, sometimes clients have a hard time deciding what to do. I found the following essay on making decisions in Josh Kaufman’s The Personal MBA – Master the Art of Business.

A decision is the act of committing to a specific plan of action. The word “decide” comes from the Latin decidere, which means “to cut off.” When you make a decision, you’re cutting off the other possible avenues that you could explore, leaving only the path you’re committing to. If you’re not cutting off viable options, you’re not really making a Decision.

No matter how good your personal productivity system is, it can’t make decisions for you. No matter how sophisticated your task-tracking system, it will never be able to tell you the best thing to do at any given moment. Constructing a system to make decisions for you is a pipe dream- all systems can do is help provide information you can use to make better decisions. Making the decision will always be your responsibility.

No Decision, large or small, is ever made with complete information. Since we can’t predict the future, we often attribute the feeling of indecisiveness to a lack of information. What’s really happening is mental thrashing – your forebrain’s job is to resolve ambiguities and make decisions, so your midbrain will continue to send signals until your forebrain does its job. Once a decision is made – whatever it is – the thrashing stops.

Don’t feel you need to have all of the information before you decide – the world is too complicated to make accurate predictions. Retired General Colin Powell famously advocates collecting half of the information available then making a decision, even though your information is clearly incomplete. “Don’t wait until you have enough facts to be 100 percent sure, because by then it is almost always too late…go with your gut.”

Failure to make a Decision is itself a decision. Life doesn’t stop if you refuse to choose – the world will keep moving forward, and you may be forced to take action by default.

For best results, make your Decisions clearly and consciously. Many people have difficulty figuring out what to do because they hesitate to actually make a decision – Loss Aversion prompts them to leave all of their options open, “just in case.” Without a decision, their brain can’t figure out how to get from where they are now to where they think they want to be, so their minds thrash around unproductively.

Simple saying to yourself, “I am deciding to do X right now,” makes it much easier to proceed. Once a Decision is finally made, your brain’s Mental Simulation planning circuits will kick into gear, and you’ll start moving again.

If you’re having difficulties making a Decision, use this question as the tiebreaker: “Out of the available options, which experience do I want to have?” If you’re having a difficult time making a particular decision, it’s probably because your brain is having a hard time figuring out which choice is best. It’s an uncomfortable situation, but what it means is that it doesn’t really matter which one you choose. If that’s true, you can simply choose the experience you find most interesting.

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What Decisions are you facing in your business?