How to Make Fast Decisions: Why Making Fast Decisions is More Effective?
The decision-making process is a life-long activity that you will encounter almost at every single step throughout your life. Therefore, it can lead to major regrets and irreversible mistakes if you don’t get good at it – and fast. Be it about your relationship, your career, or simply making a point – you can suddenly find yourself under the spotlight to make decisive shots that could make or break the day. When trying to come up with a decision, you find your mind splitting and thinking about various options. Hesitation and doubt are inevitable, which lead to confusion, pressure, and uncertainty. Understandably, some decisions need time before making them. However, there are also situations in which you need to step up to the game and know how to make decisions faster. In this post, we will be discussing some of the helpful tips that will teach you how to make quick decisions in various circumstances and pressure levels.
First Things First: Why Make Decisions Faster?
1. Slowed Decision-Making Will Cost You
A survey found that only less than half of managers felt that their companies were making timely and effective decisions. For a typical Fortune 500 company, this delay may cost to an equivalent of a whopping $250 million in wages yearly.
2. Delayed Decision-Making Leads to Vulnerability
Another study shows that knowing how to make good decisions quickly is directly relevant to better business performance. A Stanford research has concluded that while a slow decision-making process leads to poor outcome, it has even caused one firm to eventually go bankrupt.
3. Successful People Make Decisions Quickly
People who fail to accumulate money, without exception, have the habit of reaching decisions very slowly – if at all. They also tend to change these decisions quickly and quite often. Journalist Napoleon Hill’s study has found that successful people make fast decisions, while the less fortunate drag along the process by procrastinating and failing to land on a choice.
4. Slow Decision-Making Leads to Burnout
Although we believe that decision fatigue is caused by making lots of decisions, that isn’t always the case. This mental resource drain can also occur if you remain indecisive about a certain decision as well. Prolonging and dragging out a decision-making process is almost as tiring as mental multitasking, since your brain is switching back and forth between options non-stop and weighing the possibilities. This ultimately results in decreased focus and complete burnout.
How to Make Fast Decisions in 9 Easy Steps
Here are just a few tips that will teach you how to make good decisions fast in your personal, professional, and social life.
1. Stick to Your Mission
Every major decision you make must be within the boundaries of your mission – especially in business and particularly in startups. Since you don’t yet have the physical or mental resources to spread your net too wide and still succeed, you need to ask yourself which option would be the best move towards your professional goals and company targets.
2. Set a Time Limit
Giving yourself a timer will help you focus on the decision rather than getting distracted. You will need to get to the heart of the matter faster with the clock ticking and the pressure of the time limit, therefore collect the pros and cons of the situation quickly.
3. Try to Avoid Decision Fatigue
As we have discussed above, decision fatigue is a draining setback that steals away your focus and reduces your mental energy. There are hundreds of trivial daily decisions that decrease our potential to focus. This is why it is best to systematize small decisions, so you don’t have to sweat the small stuff and are ready to give your full attention when important decisions are at stake.
4. Stop Controlling the Uncontrollable
At a certain point in her career path, a leader is forced to wear multiple hats in order to develop a team to offload her responsibilities. It’s necessary to stay focused on what is in your direct control and what isn’t. Fretting on things outside your control will only result in delay and unhealthy procrastination. The quicker you will be at making big decisions once you start to focus solely on what you can control.
5. Benefit from Pattern Recognition
Even though it may not always seem as such, most of the daily decisions we face are quite similar to other scenarios we have already gone through. As soon as you grasp this concept, it becomes easier to map out a sketch of previous experiences and their possible outcomes. Effective decision-making takes practice, which is why as you continue making decisions over time, you will realize that their quality and speed have drastically improved.
6. Can the Decision Be Reversed?
Some classify decisions into two simple categories: decisions that can be taken back and decisions that can’t. While making decisions, keep this fact in mind in order to move fast as both an organization and an individual. Don’t waste your time being indecisive if you are certain that a decision can be taken back after implementation.
7. Keep Track of Your Decisions
Whether they are big or small, it sometimes helps to commit to a certain number of decisions per day. If you create a daily quota of how many decisions you make, you will begin to make them faster and more often.
8. Embrace Uncertainty
As a company, you will never have access to 100 percent of the information you need when starting something new. There aren’t always best practices, industry reports, and sample resources that you can rely on, which is why it is best to accept that you may end up wrong about a decision 25 percent of the time. Try to make as many decisions as possible, follow through with their execution, and move forwards from there.
9. Set Realistic Expectations
As with any other goal, part of improving yourself and your business entails setting realistic expectations. While this means there may be some setbacks, it is also important to know that this is more than OK. As ironic as it sounds, simply deciding to work on being more decisive and making fast decisions is a solid start to this journey.
