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One of my biggest challenges that I deal with frequently is decision paralysis.  Most of the time, I make small day to day decisions easily and without fear.  But when the decision is big enough, the consequences of making a wrong decision large enough, and the number of different options I have is large, I go into over-analysis mode and can become incapable of making a decision.

To help with this, I read a book called The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz.  It’s a very in-depth look at how choices affect us, how people make choices, and what we can do to improve the process.  It’s the author’s contention, and based on experience I now fully agree, that too much choice is a bad thing and leads to unhappiness.  If you only have to choose between A, B, or C, that’s fairly straightforward.  But if you have to choose between very comparable choices A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, and L, a whole host of problems arise.

Study after study has shown that when presented with fewer options, consumers spend more money.  One study put dozens of jams in a display in the front of a store vs. just 6 or so jams.  Consumers bought more jam when there were only 6.  Consumers think they want choice, but when it comes down to it, choice is overwhelming and leads to no choice.

If you have to have the best, and nothing but the best will do, then you’re not going to stop when you’ve found an option that works, you’re going to have to evaluate every single option to find the best.  In doing so, not only does this consume a huge amount of time and is exhausting, but what happens is that by choosing option G, you start to think about all that you’re missing out by NOT choosing all of the other options.  That negative emotion then overpowers any happiness that option G can deliver.  So the option you chose now makes you unhappy!  If you could go to France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Hawaii, or Alaska, and you choose to go to France after much deliberation, you’ll be thinking about the great food that you missed in Italy, the warm sun that you missed in Hawaii, the beauty that you’re missing in Alaska, and so forth, so that your France trip now sucks a bit because of all the missed opportunity that you can’t help but think about.  You would have been happier if you hadn’t considered all of those other choices.

Then there’s the problem of adaptation which has to be factored into choice.  If you haven’t figured it out by now, that shiny new car that you just had to have 2 years ago is now boring, and that’s the case with everything we choose.  We adapt.  Things that we just have to have today, we eventually get used to no matter what.  That’s why people that don’t “get” this are in a never ending upgrade cycle, have $250,000 worth of cars in their garage, and are still unhappy.  So when making choices, you have to forecast how the choice will feel in 6 months, 12 months, not 2 weeks, and realize that new things that are amazing and exciting now, will be “just” comfortable or pleasant in a few months or years.

So after thinking about all of this a great deal, I’ve come up with a few tricks that have helped me make better decisions with less effort and end up being happier with the decisions that I do make.

Filtering Is Your Friend

A fantastic example of this is Olive Garden’s Neverendingpastabowl.com, where you’re presented with a whopping 42 pasta/sauce choices.  Do we really need 42 pasta/sauce dinner choices when we sit down to eat?  How ridiculous.  But… Through the magic of filtering, you only have to choose 1 of 7 pastas, then once you’ve made that choice, 1 of 6 sauces.  That way, you access all 42 options, but you do so in a way that isn’t as overwhelming as evaluating each of 42 options.

The same is true of cars.  Let’s say you know you want to buy a BMW 335i.  So you go to the car lot and they have every single possible combination of colors and options on the lot: blue ones, red ones, silver ones, 6 speeds, automatics, leather, fake leather, convertibles, coupes, sedans, and you have to look at every car on the lot, maybe several thousand, to choose one.  Impossible right?  But if you use filtering, you look at one category at a time: what color?  Silver.  Ok, you just narrowed it down several thousand cars.  What transmission?  Hopefully, you can narrow it down to just a few options this way.

Thus, I’ve found that the best way to make a decision is to constrain the number of options as much as possible, maybe down to 3, using filtering.  That way, I’m not even spending any energy evaluating all of the other options, and feeling bad about opportunities not chosen.  I use broad category filters to exclude possible options.

Not Deciding is Still Deciding: Know When to Take the Plunge

If you’ve narrowed your options down to 3 really great choices, you know that you would be happier with any one of those 3 options than doing nothing (but you’re just not sure which one), and yet you don’t choose any one of them because you can’t decide, you’re actually choosing option 4: to do nothing.  When I encountered this recently, I finally realized that I was going to be happier with any of the options that I narrowed in on than my current situation, so I was just going to make the best decision I could, comforted by the fact that any of the 3 options were better than option 4: doing nothing.

Go With Your Gut

We’re complex beings with complex minds.  We’re able to evaluate options on a level that goes far beyond pros and cons lists.  Quick: what does your gut tell you?  Usually, you can answer that question in seconds, or at least, know which way your gut is leaning.  You usually don’t need to spend a week researching and pouring over pros and cons lists, because something within you is able to take a complex decision and boil it down without any “thinking” required.  When we ignore our gut, we get into trouble.  Sometimes the gut does get confused though, but it’s much less likely to get confused if you’ve properly narrowed down your options because it can only give you feedback about a very small number of options at one time.

Become a Satisficer

Satisficers accept things that are good enough, while maximizers have to have the best.  A satisficer, looking at choices, A-Z, would evaluate A, B, then C, then D, and if D meets their criteria as good enough, they’ll stop.  A maximizer has to evaluate every option A-Z to make sure they aren’t missing out.  For a true maximizer learning to accept “good enough” is very hard, but maximizers absolutely fail to take into account the time and energy needed to find the “best”.  Even if there really is something better than that “good enough” option, the time, energy, hassle, and risk of decision paralysis from too much choice and not making any choice, outweighs any extra benefit of trying to find that best option.  This view changed my life quite a bit.  When I was shopping for something online, I had to have the best — I’d spend hours trying to read reviews, evaluate all the options.  Now, I strive to just stop when I’ve found something that looks good and meets my needs, and I’m happier for it.