Personally I find that the busier I become, the harder it is to make a decision. I get bombarded with literally hundreds of messages every day, from the fax, the phone, email, letters and internally from my team – there is so much to do that finding the time to make a decision on any one thing can be really difficult. But if I don’t make decisions, my workload backs up, my clients get frustrated and so do my staff.
A friend of mine who has run some very large corporations pulled me aside a little while ago and gave me some important advice – she said that I had to learn to start making decisions right now – don’t keep putting them on the back burner for when I would have more time to think about them, because all I will do is end up with an ever expanding list of “decisions to be made” that I will never get to the end of.
I took her advice and she was spot on. I make decisions on the spot as often as possible. Sure some things need a little more time to ponder but in reality the vast majority of my decisions are simple yes or no decisions that someone else needs to action. This has had quite an amazing flow on to my daily workload. It seems that I have a lot less to do – I don’t go home with a never ending list of things to think about and everyone I deal with are happier because they are getting their decisions quickly.
Sure sometimes I make the wrong the decisions, but that happened before as well – we all get it right sometimes and wrong sometimes but I think the number of wrong decisions I make has declined significantly.
WHAT CAN YOU DO TODAY? Do you procrastinate when it comes to making decisions? End it today.
Hi Andrew, Procrastination is something that we are all guilty of at some stage, one way of overcoming this behavior is to firstly, list the reasons why we are putting this action off! And secondly the ultimate consequence of doing so. Once this is done, list as many advantages as you can that you will gain from following through with this action and finally time frame it with three simple steps that need to be in place for you to complete your action.
Mark Flintoff – Attitude Training & Development