Life Heuristics: Making good life decisions & handling decision anxiety

Making decisions stress me out. It’s probably my biggest weakness.

There was a time if I was hungry, but couldn’t decide what to eat, I just wouldn’t eat.

I forget where i read it, but life is really about making decisions every day. To improve my life and address my decision anxiety I developed a set of life heuristics. When I have a decision I spend more than 1 minute thinking about, I think about how it aligns with these heuristics.

This isn’t a formal exercise where I sit down and make a list of heuristics and then sit down and decide how well a decision aligns with these guidelines. I simply add to the list whenever i realize a new and important consideration in making decisions and then quickly reference them mentally when faced with indecisiveness.

Here are three key principles for making decisions, I don’t remember where I got these from but it’s been assimilated into my mind from twitter:

Choosing between two things, choose which ever will give you more randomness (ex. should I stay in or go to this event, should I workout at home or go to the gym)

Think about why you’re having a hard decision. Does one option make you uncomfortable or cause inconvenience, choose that option. We tend to devalue the benefits of uncomfortable decisions, so if it’s making you uncomfortable and you’re still considering it, it’s probably a really good decision.

When you think about something, just do it.

Here are my life heuristics:

When in doubt doing something is better than doing nothing

If you sleep, eat, clean, workout, spend time with loved ones, prioritize health, rest, meet someone new, learn something new….it will never be a waste of time

If it’s past 9pm and can’t decide what to do, go to bed

If it’s 9pm and you haven’t started what ever it is you want to start, go to bed

When in doubt, say yes to new opportunities

When in doubt, you can always earn more money you can never get back time

When in doubt help others

When in doubt choose randomness

If you meet someone new ask them to hangout immediately!

When in doubt stick to the plan

Here are tweets that influence how I make decisions:

@sweatystartup

@startingfromnix