Show Notes

Episode 16: Decision Making

We make thousands of decisions a day. Some are easy. Some are hard. And some are harder than they need to be. In this episode, Shannon and Janine talk about making decisions a little easier.

Discussion topics include:

  • The difficult decisions brought on by modern television viewing
  • How having many options makes it more difficult to make decisions
  • Using your limited to decision-making capacity for important decisions
  • How perfectionism hampered Shannon’s car-buying ability
  • Shannon’s closet-clearing strategy (Janine thinks it’s brilliant)
  • The coin-flipping method of decision making (it’s fun and sneaky)
  • Strategies for restaurant-related decisions
  • The secret decision-making formula: know what’s most important to you about a decision and use those parameters to narrow the options and make a choice.

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1 thought on “Episode 16: Decision Making”

  1. I really enjoyed reading the articles included in this post. The coin flip method is great. You’re right! There is that moment before and after where your gut knows what your mind doesn’t. I need to pay more attention to those moments in making decisions. The Decision Fatigue article was very interesting. Yesterday I did four hours of sentimental decluttering of my mom’s and grandma’s photo albums. I got four feet of stacked photo albums down to four inches in a shoebox that I want to keep. And most of those I’m sending to my brother, sister, and first cousins since they have children to pass them down to. I’m going to be very frugal with what I keep. I hope to go completely digital with photos over time. Once I finish with these podcasts, I’m going to set myself a task of scanning and digitizing at least 10 per day. But I digress. As a result of making over 1000 decisions to throw away photos that either were of people I didn’t know or did not have identifying information on the back, I was positively exhausted night. Absolutely drained.

    The “foodie town” comments about choosing a restaurant reminded me of something I did a couple years ago when we had a lot of downtime at work (my job is at an international company’s call center and we were in a slow period)…it was nice getting paid to do this! I created a notebook in Evernote called Dining Out (I created another one called Drinking which has brewpubs, wineries, happy hours, etc.) and started Googling “best (type of food) restaurants in Kansas City.) TripAdvisor came up with a lot of the results and I would click on their link to go to the restaurant’s Web site. I would copy-and-paste their URL into my Evernote notebook in alphabetical order below a plain-text name of the cafe. We use this notebook to keep from going to the same places all the time. When we are trying to come up with a restaurant suggestion, I just open up Evernote and say, “What sounds good to you? African, Breakfast/Brunch, Burgers, Cajun/Creole, Caribbean, Chinese, Deli, French, German/Austrian, Greek, Indian, Italian, Japanese/Sushi, Korean, Mediterranean, Mexican, Pizza, Seafood, Soul Food, Spanish/Tapas, Steakhouse, Thai, Vegan/Vegetarian, or Vietnamese?” Then once we’ve agreed on a food specialty, I open up the corresponding note, we agree on a restaurant, and this is the most important part, I write down the date we went there. That way, I can say, “Hey, we were just there two months ago,” and get them to go somewhere else.

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