How to Make Quick Decisions — Use These 5 Strategies to Save Yourself Time (and Anxiety)
Making quick decisions will improve your life drastically.
Sweat starts to bead up on your forehead. You go back and forth in your mind. You feel anxious and sick to your stomach. You don’t want to choose the wrong thing, but which thing is the right one?
“You have to make a decision!”
“OK, I’ll take the burger. Medium, please.”
Most life decisions are easy ones like this, and yet, many people still struggle to decide. What happens when you need to make harder life decisions?
How can you make quick decisions that will save you time and leave you feeling good (instead of anxious)?
“Men who succeed reach decisions promptly, and change them, if at all, very slowly. Men who fail, reach decisions, if at all, very slowly, and change them frequently, and quickly.” —Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich
The problem you have with making decisions is you don’t want to make the wrong decision and suffer the consequences. Even though what to eat for dinner isn’t a life-altering decision, you may have a past experience where it was the wrong decision and you ended up regretting it.
“Ugh. This pizza is terrible. I knew I should’ve gotten the chicken!”
That memory stays in your mind and when you have to make another decision, you remember that mistake.
“What if I choose wrong again? I don’t trust myself to pick the right option.”
You’ll forget about your bad dinner in no time. But other life choices might matter more. However, making quick decisions is the best way to keep moving forward in life.
Here are 5 strategies you can use to help you make quick decisions.
1. Trust yourself.
There is too much noise. We are bombarded with advice from friends, family, the news, politicians, and people on social media. We’ve lost the ability to listen to our intuition. Yet, if you can tap into it, that’s all you’ll ever need.
One way to tap into your inner guidance is to think about a decision you have to make and then meditate. You will likely “hear” or “feel” the right decision. The problem with this strategy is it can be too slow. Our goal is to make quick decisions.
(But the meditation strategy is good if you have a really big, life-altering choice to make.)
For a faster strategy, I recommend this advice from Gary Vaynerchuk:
“The right call, 9 out of 10 times, is the fastest call.”
When you decide quickly, you are trusting yourself that it’s going to be the right call. And it almost always is.
But what if it isn’t?
2. Mistakes happen.
You won’t always make the right decisions. Sometimes you make a mistake and the decision you made isn’t the right one. I’d like to go to Gary Vee once again for advice about this. He says:
“I get everything wrong. But I can’t recall it because I’m moving on to the next thing.”
In other words, if you get something wrong, who cares? It’s over and done with. Move on.
3. Practice makes perfect.
Practice making quick decisions on things that don’t matter much. When my husband and I were remodeling our kitchen earlier this year, we had to make decisions on all kinds of things — paint color, flooring type, backsplash, door handles, light fixtures, etc.
These are minor things that could have held up the project if we spent time hemming and hawing. I told him, “Let’s just make fast decisions on all of these and get it going.” We spent very little time deciding between things that were approximately the same.
If you can get good at deciding between smaller things in life, you’ll ultimately get better at making quicker decisions on the bigger stuff.
4. The coin trick.
I used this one on my daughter when she was debating whether or not to quit gymnastics.
“I’ll throw a coin in the air. Heads mean you keep going to gymnastics. Tails mean you quit. But here’s the key. As it’s getting tossed in the air, figure out which side you want it to land on. That’s the right decision.”
She said, “I already know I want it to land on tails before you even throw it.”
I sent an email the very next day pulling her from the program.
5. Visualize the outcomes.
Take your choices and visualize each of the outcomes. Which one feels better?
When I was deciding whether or not to return to my school job, I would imagine what it would feel like to park my car on the street and walk up the hill to the door where I went in. I see myself doing that day after day after day for the entire year.
Then I would visualize myself sitting on my deck and writing (as I’m currently doing). I thought about how each outcome felt.
The dread that came over me when I thought of walking up the hill for the next nine months told me which decision was the correct one.
To Sum It Up…
Making quick decisions will improve your life drastically by saving you time, making you less anxious, and making you more productive. You can decide quickly by:
- Trusting your inner guidance
- Understanding mistakes happen
- Practicing small decisions
- Using the coin trick
- Visualizing the outcomes
Will you get it perfect every time? No. But that’s life. Use your mistakes as a learning lesson and move on.
About the Author
Hey! I’m Christina, an introverted book nerd on the outside, and a raging metalhead on the inside. 🤘 I’m a married mom to two teenagers (and 3 cats and a dog). I love Vegas 🎰, the band Chevelle 🎸, and murder mysteries 📖.
I also love creating short, daily lists of resources and ideas to help you boost your online income. 👈 Click that astonishingly long link to sign up for free.
