Overcoming Indecision
The waitress came around one more time to see if we were ready to order yet. I couldn’t decide. Should I get the pasta or the chicken? I stared at the menu, trying to imagine which I would like more. My friends, bored, talked around me. After the third time, the waitress stopped coming back. After an hour, one of my friends finally put their foot down and said I had to decide. I picked the chicken, even though I was not sure that it was the best choice. In the end, it was fine, but I still didn’t know if it was what I should have ordered. Was it better than the pasta would have been? I continued to be indecisive even after the decision was irrevocably made.
Indecision can be crippling. At the least, it wastes time for both the person who is being indecisive and for everyone around them. At the worst, it squanders or eliminates opportunities. If you take too long to decide, some of the options may disappear. I’ve seen that happen when trying to book flights. I’ll spend an hour looking at flights and comparing options; then, when I choose the one that is best, I get told that the flight has now sold out. But most of the time when we are being indecisive, we can’t see the choices we missed out on. We might stand in a store agonizing over this shirt or that pair of pants and never know what wondrous adventure we might have had if we had finished our shopping and gone for a walk in the park.
I was indecisive for much of my young adulthood. This is ironic, because the moto of my high school was “Carpe Diem: Seize the Day.” How did I overcome my indecision? I’d say there were three forces.
First, my friends were often impacted by my indecision. Over time, they got used to it and simply thought of me as being indecisive. However, as I wasted their time over and over, they eventually became assertive and told me I just needed to decide. So I did. My friend Daryl once said, “Sometimes it’s not important WHAT you decide: It’s just important THAT you decide.” I wrote this on the board in front of my desk. Many times, this wise advice from one of my oldest friends helped save me needless agonizing.
Second, I would say that my own indecisiveness stemmed from perfectionism. I wanted to make the best decision. However, I eventually reframed my perfectionism. Instead of making the perfect decision, my quest should be to expend the perfect amount of time and effort. If the consequences of a decision weren’t that big, I shouldn’t spend that much time on it. I used this heuristic just yesterday. I was trying to decide how much money to transfer from my checking account (which earns an amazing 0.00% interest) to my savings account (which earns an equally amazing 0.05% interest). After agonizing about it for a while, I calculated how much extra interest I would earn by transferring money, realized it wasn’t enough money to be worth worrying about, and left the money where it is.
Third, I watched a video about how to paint in oil colors. The artist explained that you need to make concrete decisions when you are painting. Will the sky be dark or light? Will the light source be on the left or behind? If you don’t make decisions, your painting will be a mess. He said that there is no wrong decision. The only wrong decision you can make is to not make a decision. He said you should just make a decision, try it out, and if you don’t like it, change it.
Oil paintings have a lot of freedom, because you can paint over something if you don’t like how it looks. Real life is not that flexible. If you buy a car you don’t like and have to trade it for another, you’ll probably lose a lot of money in the transfer: It’s better to buy the right car first. If you accept Job A instead of Job B, that second job won’t be an option anymore. But even so, the most important part of the decision is that you make one. If you don’t make a decision, you can’t move forward.
Using these three rules, I’ve come to accept that I need to make decisions more quickly. However, there is the question of how to decide. Lately, I’ve been approaching decisions from the perspective of Type I and Type II errors in statistics. With any decision, there are two errors I could make. I consider what those two errors look like and figure out which one is worse – that’s the error I want to avoid. For example, my husband and I have a dog named Murphy. He’s energetic, smart, and food motivated, which makes him easy to train. But he also has his own opinions and if he doesn’t want to do something, he doesn’t. He loves hiking but he pulls on the leash. He loves dog agility, but he occasionally runs wild, leaping over jumps and going through tunnels, joyously happy and completely out of control. We heard about a two-week off-leash training program. Murphy would stay with the trainers for two weeks. They guaranteed that he would be able to walk off-leash at the end. Should we do it or not?
Bring out the statistical reasoning! If we did it and it worked, that would be a good decision. If it wouldn’t work and we decided against it, that would be a good decision. The other two possibilities were errors. If it was effective training but we didn’t do it, we would have a dog who continued to pull on the leash and who couldn’t be trusted at dog agility. This was the status quo, and we knew what it looked like. This was the future we were hoping to avoid. On the other hand, what if we did the training and it didn’t work? That was harder to imagine. Perhaps we would spend a lot of money and it would have almost no effect. Well, I figured, at least we would have tried. No harm done. Or perhaps the training would have an effect, but not a good one. My husband and I agreed that Murphy is resilient, happy, and unafraid, and that the trainers had good reviews, so we didn’t think that the training would harm Murphy. Balancing these two possible errors against each other, we decided to go ahead. I’m delighted to say that the training worked: We now have a dog who can hike off-leash and who stays focused during dog agility! Moreover, Murphy is often unbearably excited just walking down the street or when doing routine agility: He loves being off-leash! But even if it hadn’t worked, I would know that I had made the best decision I could. Considering the Type I and Type II errors of possible decisions has therefore eliminated my post-decision indecision.
We are all faced with decisions. What major to study? What graduate program to attend? What city to live in? What job to take? Sometimes the consequences are minor, in which case you shouldn’t spend too much time on the decision. Sometimes the consequences are major, in which case you should make the best decision you can and then act on it. Many sources say you should list the pros and cons of a decision. I advocate you take this one step further. List each of the errors you could make. Think about how likely each one is. And consider the fact that making no decision is itself often an error and often has worse consequences than picking one of the options.
Kimberly A. Barchard is the Director of the Interactive Measurement Group and an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at UNLV. She joined UNLV in 2001 after obtaining her MA and PhD in Psychometrics. She works to empower students and colleagues to accomplish their personal and professional goals, particularly through the development of organization, communication, and research skills.