Every day you’re bombarded by choices, often from the time you get up to the time you go to bed. And that can add stress to your life. This week Janine and Shannon discuss how they make their lives easier by limiting the choices they have to make on a regular basis.
Discussion topics include:
- The joy of limitations
- How having fewer clothes makes getting dressed easier.
- Shannon’s strategy for limiting choices during a renovation (she recently built a house from scratch!)
- Harnessing the expertise of others to limit your choices
- Janine’s penchant for resale stores
- How we used the principle of limited choices to make aspects of launching the podcast easy.
- Creating limits when researching new purchases, even apps
- Finding ways to limit things and make the good-enough choice
- Optimizers vs satisficers
- The key to happiness: Getting comfortable with being satisfied with good-enough choices
- Learning to live with something vs fixing it
- How chasing perfection can mean you spend more time on something than it warrants
Links:
- Episode 70, with a picture of Shannon’s beautifully organized t-shirt drawer
- Episode 5, where we discussed how we limited choices (and let go of perfectionism) to make creating this podcast easier
.Looking for help on line. Not much luck: Lots of “Welcome to . . . . “ no advice. Yours seems the most promising so far. How do I get to the help?
Hi Earline, the “help” we provide is via podcast. You can listen to the episodes here, by clicking play on the player above. The show notes will give you bullet points on each episode’s topic. You can also listen using a podcast player on a smartphone or other device.
“Too many choices,” indeed! I feel like I am bombarded with choices and become paralyzed in trying to make a decision. I love Shannon’s idea of having her contractor pick 3 good choices for items and just make her decision from them. If I ever have a custom-built house done, that’s exactly what I am going to do.
I’m going to need to read up on Optimizers versus Satisficers. Where do I find more information about that?
Christy, it would be easy to fall down a Google rabbit hole on the topic of Satisficers and Optimizers (also referred to as Maximizers) from behavioral economics. So, to get you started, here’s a relatively short, but in-depth piece: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/science-choice/201506/satisficing-vs-maximizing
Thanks for the link. I am a satisficer, I’m pretty sure. And I’m getting better at it, thanks to this podcast.