Tools for Thought

On her Abundance Blog, Marelisa Fabrega wrote great post on How to Make Decisions. The article is a virtual toolbox of methods to pick from when faced with a dilemma. I enjoyed it overall, but it opened with a statement reflecting a popular sentiment, especially among activists, that I subtly disagree with:

If you have to make a choice and you don’t make one, that in itself is a decision.

I would assert that if you have a choice of outcomes and you don’t make a choice, there will still be an outcome — probably an unintended or undesirable one. That may seem like splitting hairs, but let’s take a closer look at our choices.

The three levels of decision making

Whenever a choice presents itself to us, we can respond to it three different ways:

1. We can avoid making a decision, or avoid recognizing that a decision needs to be made
2. We can consciously defer the decision, pending a specific amount of time or information
3. We can make an affirmative or negative decision

The latter two levels make things accountable. We can follow the bouncing ball. I might defer making a decision on a job offer until I know what kind of pay I can expect; or if I know the pay, how it compares to the competition. I might decide to accept the job or reject it. By deferring a decision, I don’t have to think further about it until a clearly defined condition has been met. By making an explicit decision, I’m free to either pursue the option I’ve accepted or to pursue alternatives without being preoccupied with the option I’ve rejected.

The first level isn’t decision making at all. It’s the passive formation of what in GTD is called an open loop. An open loop is an incomplete cycle of intention. When something consumes our attention, but we don’t recognize or define the purpose for it consuming our attention, it becomes a persistent distraction. Here’s the example of an open loop I used when commenting on Marelisa’s post:

John: We should get together and have dinner sometime.

Jane: Yeah, that sounds like a great idea.

But no follow-up is made on this proposal. The idea was simply “thrown out there” rather than turned into action. Now consider an alternative scenario:

John: We should get together and have dinner sometime.

Jane: Well, my husband would get the wrong impression, so I’m going to have to say no.

Both cases are disappointing for John, since he’s eating alone either way. But in the second case, he has one consolation: closure. His mind is released from the cycle of expectation that opens when “sometime” sounds “like a great idea.” We experience a microcosm of this when everyone in a group spends 10 minutes “deciding” that “anywhere is fine” for having lunch.

Open loops can be trivially small or existentially large, but all of them have an aggregate effect on our ability to think and be present in the moment. Someone might have a candy wrapper that’s been sitting on a table for a week because he hasn’t explicitly identified it as trash. Another person might sense a general dissatisfaction with her job without ever consciously acknowledging the need for a complete career change. Both of these are distractions.

Small open loops seem innocuous, but they can slip into our heads more insidiously that big ones. The problem occurs when they accumulate. Having 30 small “candy wrapper” level of inputs to process can weigh on a person more than one large one, simply due to the number of decisions — especially when the inputs remain generalized. There’s a difference between “a piece of paper” on your desk and “an internal memo,” “an invoice,” and “meeting notes.”

That’s why it’s important to process each item (identifying and making a decision about what to do with it) until there’s nothing left to process. I used to leave “a couple” or “a few” things on my desk unprocessed, not thinking that it was a big deal.

Once I resolved to process everything to zero, I realized that the difference was huge. When processing is incomplete on any level, the mind knows that they’re might be something important lurking in the unprocessed pile, so there’s no way to know definitively that the current priority choice is, in fact, the right choice; it’s remains relative.

Eliminating background noise

The more open loops we have hovering at the edge of our awareness, the harder it is to perceive them. It’s hard to hear a pin drop in a factory. The first order of business is to eliminate busyness — to shut down the machinery.

Collect any stray paperwork and funnel it into your in-basket, then process it. If you still have paperwork lingering around that’s not actionable or tossable, you may be lacking a general reference filing system for miscellaneous storage. Repeat the same process with email, so that nothing remains in your inbox: once you’ve deleted and archived nonactionable messages, and replied instantly to the ones that clearly require less than two minutes to act on, you’re left with an empty inbox and an “@Action” or “Reply” folder/tag with nothing but messages that you know need further action; there’s no need to decide again that further action is required.

Then do a mind sweep. Make a list of anything that’s still taking up attention. Once this list is complete — when your head feels empty — process them, one at a time, until you’ve made a decision on each one. When you’ve finally gotten to the point when there’s nothing left to process, the clarity that results from having made a decision on absolutely everything that needs a decision is something that has to be experienced to be understood.

(Photo credit: kurafire)

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