It is estimated that most people average around 35,000 decisions made every day. Your brain seeks to maximize efficiency by automatically making most of these decisions routine. Whether consciously or subconsciously, you’ll arrive at a few hundred decisions that you actively think about. This is the first level of filtering that your brain does in order to maximize efficiency.
For the active decisions, you make deliberate choices as to how to filter those decisions. This includes the different strategies, tactics and actions that add up to determine if your MSP thrives, or merely survives. Building on what we started last week breaking down decision making in order to improve it, let’s take a closer look at decision-making scope.
Size of the decision
Whether a decision is major or minor is the first level of filtering. In general, you want to spend more time considering major decisions so having a good sense of what’s important helps to filter things out. Too often, we can find ourselves bogged down in decisions that actually aren’t that big.
Reversible or irreversible
This is just straight up common sense. If you can’t undo a decision, you’re going to put a little more thought into it, regardless of its size or importance.
Repeatable or non-repeatable
This one’s for those day-to-day operating decisions you make. Often, processes evolve organically. You do things a certain way because you’ve always done them that way. A lot of times, you actually know there’s a better way, but it’s not a big decision so you keep doing it the old way. Yet, if you add up time savings over how many times you make that decision, you’ll probably find it’s a bigger decision than you thought, just because of how many times it is repeated in the course of running your business.
Next up, a discussion of reactive versus proactive decision making.
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