RandomRant #1: When and how to reconsider your decisions
I am a pretty analytical person. This has some pro’s en con’s. I can come up with some real cool stuff when i think a lot about a subject.
One negative side though is doubting decisions and analysing after you’ve made it.
This can make you decide multiple times within an x period of time. This week i had a meeting set up, canceled, and set up again within the time span of 15 minutes.
It has struck me more times where i get parrylized by the fact that i have to make a decision. A lot of those times the actual choice does not matter that much. Sometimes you gain a little in x and lose a little in y. For example, loose some energy en gain some social status / experience.
So then comes the question: Is analysing your decisions after you’ve made them usefull?
that’s actually a good question. The first thing that comes to my mind is the impact that the decision had. So this must be established first / in the beginning.
If the importance and outcome difference is minimal than it’s good to just make a decision and stick with it. Brainpower used for minor life events are totally useless.
So after we established that the outcome makes a decent impact and is worthy to think about it’s time to think about the situation. Hereby there are certain factors that are important. For example:
- Is there new data that needs to be taken into concideration?
- Did you previously not have enough time to make the decision?
Decisions are almost always made with having incomplete information. Thereby is also important the amount of different variables. They can be 5 but they can also be 100. When you have 100 variables in a certain decision it’s pretty hard to make the decision. So how would one go about doing something like that?
What pops in my head is eliminating the lesser important stuff. Maybe it’s good to select the 3 – 6 most important factors. Than give those factors a weight. Than rank than and do the rank by weight and calculate what the outcome is.
For example, you want to buy a new house. The most important factors you came up with are:
- Location
- Price
- Squere meters
- prettyness
Than the price is probably the most important factor.
Than let’s say you scale them 1 to 5 (3 being average – 5 being good). Maybe the size is less important so you only give that on a 1 to 2.
Another way to use a 1 to 5 scale and do that times a numer of importance.
Enough about calculations. That was a way to make the new decision easier. Incase it’s worth it to reconsider a made decision or you have made one.
I hope this can help someone out a little. It helps me atleast to write it down and understand the decision making process better.
P.S. In case i come across another method or read about some stuff i’ll update it.
