Hack Your Day | » How to make difficult decisions

How to make difficult decisions

Question mark Those of you who read Hack Your Day probably noticed that I didn’t show any life signs for about two weeks. This was a conscientious decision I made, and although it was hard, it was ultimately worth it, and I feel totally comfortable with it. I also have a day job, which I do from home, but the amount of work I needed to do escalated there and I had to make the difficult decision to stop all my blogging activities for a week or two.

Many people don’t really manage to make these decisions, and don’t know how to make decisions easy on themselves. There are two types of people, the first one will try and multitask, the other person will make the choice, but then dabble in both parts of their life creating a much worse situation.

Let me give you a checklist of what I think you should go over when you are faced with a difficult decision.

Go through the possible solutions to your problem
Realize what your decisions mean to you
Spend time thinking about the impact of each
Choose a decision and accept the consequences
Follow it through

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Obviously the first thing to do is to go through all your options. Are you sure there aren’t better solutions? Take a look at the 100 item list decision making process if you need some inspiration. I don’t want to go into this part, I assume that you know the possible solutions to your problem.

Make sure that you realize what the decisions mean to you. If you stop blogging for two weeks, you know that you can’t write posts, your visitor count will suffer, you will not be active in your community for a while and so on. These all have implications of varying degree, you should assess these impacts and use the information in the decision making process.

When I say spend time thinking on the impact, I mean what does this mean in terms of your to-do’s later on. In my case it means hundreds of unread emails, thousands of unread Google Reader items, some of which I do need to follow up on, it means I have to get re-settled in my blogging environment and so on. In essence, this, and the item before are the negative consequences of your decision.

When you feel informed enough, make the decision, and make sure you are familiar with all the consequences and have accepted those. I accepted that I can’t write for you guys, I won’t be able to follow up on news and that I will fall out of the community for a while. You also need to go through the positive consequences, you need to know why you are doing this. For me, this meant I could work on another project with greater efficiency. I would do a good job, and then I could come back, and after everything is sorted out in the blogging business, I would be in a better state overall.

Additionally, you need to make sure that you follow your decision through. Many people in my place would have blogged just a bit now and then, so that they wouldn’t fall totally out. In some cases this may be the way to go, but for me this would have meant much lower productivity in both areas. I’d rather not blog for two weeks than do a half-hearted post now and again. I would have suffered in the other project as well, since my mind works best if I can focus on one thing for a longer amount of time.

The comparative rule

In decisions like this, I like to think of the comparative advantage principal from economics. Although not quite analogous, it fits pretty well. Basically, I sacrifice something to make me overall better of in the longer run. By doing both projects I may advance my monthly income like so: $100, $150, $225 for three consecutive months, a steady 50% increase. By focusing on one thing, ideally I will loose first, but then overall be on the winning side, perhaps like so: $100, $140, $280. If you manage to achieve this, even the hardest decision was worth it.