Decisions, decisions. Whether you’re deciding what to eat for dinner or whether you want your next job to be closer to home or farther away, it’s important that you make an informed choice. If a decision is important enough, it can feel like it will change your life forever—and that’s not hyperbole! The reality of being married or starting a family or buying a house is often more complex than we can imagine when we’re standing in the glow of new love. So how do we know if these decisions are really what we want? Or should we look elsewhere? Luckily for us all, science has finally come up with some answers!
Consider your longterm goals.
Long-term goals are the type of things you want to do in the future. Examples might be getting a college degree, starting a business, buying a house, etc.
As you can see, these are all very different from short-term goals (which we will discuss below). For example, if your long-term goal is buying a house and your short term goal is saving up enough money for down payment, then it’s highly unlikely that your short term goal would change over time!
Think about what you’ll have to give up in each scenario.
- Think about what you’ll have to give up in each scenario.
- What is the most important thing to you in each scenario?
- What is the second-most important thing to you in each scenario?
- What are the pros and cons of each option?
Give yourself a time limit.
When you’re faced with two tough decisions, it can be difficult to know which one is best. To help you make a choice, set yourself a time limit for when you will have made your decision. This gives you a deadline so that if you don’t make the decision by the time specified, then the decision will be made for you (and it might not be the choice that’s best for your situation).
Setting a deadline forces us to come up with an answer much faster than we would if we kept thinking about it over and over again. If there were no deadlines in life—or at least no consequences for missing them—we’d just keep second-guessing ourselves forever! When we do have an endpoint in sight, however; our brains get excited by this new information and work harder than ever before because now there’s even more on the line: We’ve got stakes! And for some reason humans are really good at making decisions when they have something to gain or lose (like money).
Allow yourself time to get used to the idea.
Making a decision is always hard, but it’s even harder when you’re forced to choose between two options and there are no easy answers. You may feel like this is a problem that only affects other people, but it’s not! We all have those moments where we find ourselves stuck between two choices and have no idea what to do.
Sometimes it helps to think of your life as a sandwich: there are two slices of bread (the pros), filled with meat (the cons), garnished with condiments (a sprinkling of feelings). When faced with a decision between two options, try asking yourself: Which choice tastes better? If you can’t decide between steak or chicken salad on your sandwich because they both sound good enough in different ways, maybe having both would be the best option!
Flip a coin. Or use this website!
So you’re faced with a hard decision, but you don’t want to flip a coin. You’re not alone! Luckily, there are plenty of other ways to make your decision without resorting to chance. One option is YesNoDice (yesnodice.com), a free website that uses an algorithm to help you decide whether or not to do something.
YesNoDice works by asking you questions about yourself and your decision-making process, then uses this information along with data from previous users to generate an answer based on the best available evidence and analysis. The site says that its goal is “to help people make better decisions.” The more carefully you answer each prompt, the more likely it will be able to give you accurate advice!
Conclusion
After reading this article, you should be able to make a decision. If not, we suggest flipping a coin or using our website (see link above). We hope this helps!