Indecision can be one of the powerful productivity inhibitors. It can be a powerful force against projects and actions that can help move your professional and/or personal life forward. We wanted this episode to help you make great decisions and provide you with strategies and techniques to combat indecision.

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In this Cast | Indecision's Last Stand

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Show Notes | Indecision's Last Stand: How to Make Great Decisions

Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, PhD

Systems 1 and 2 thinking processes and cognitive reflection testing in medical students

Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono, MD, PhD

We discussed Six Thinking Hats methodology more in Episode 053, Optimism Versus Pessimism.

Robust decisions

Uncertainty decision model

Pugh decision matrix

Sample Pugh decision matrix template (Google Sheets workbook)

(Note: Once you open the link above in your Web browser, use File > Download, or File > Make a Copy... to use this Google Sheets workbook as a template for your own decision-making.)

SWOT Analysis

Ego depletion (as explained in Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy F. Baumeister, PhD, and John Tierney)

Raw Text Transcript | Indecision's Last Stand

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).

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Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:00

Hey there, productivity cast listeners. Before we jump into this week's episode, I wanted to make a small apology and a big announcement. First, you'll notice the delay in getting this week's episode out. Sorry about that. The reason why you'll notice as soon as the episode starts, the audio quality for my track is a bit wonky. I was on a cloud environment because of work travel, and had to record that way hoping the audio was usable. After a lot of internal debate. The audio is not ideal, but it's palatable. We always strive to give you as clean audio when we can as record across thousands of miles between us and time zones. So hopefully the content and audio over listening through this episode will be back to a quiet recording environment with next week's episode. Next, the big news. As some of you may know from being in my GTD meetups in Washington, DC in New York City, I'm hosting a live remote conference productivity summit on October 4, and fifth 2019. To learn more and register visit productivity summit.org. This is an idea I had about five years ago to bring together all the personal productivity experts and community I've met along my own personal productivity journey over these many years. Today, we have the technology to do that without having to travel but to our nearest desktop laptop, or mobile device, which you've already done if you're listening to me right now. So a few details about productivity summit, it will have four tracks track one is productivity, how to be more productive, using principles, strategies and techniques, track to his technology, what and how to use specific technologies to get things done. Track three is all about organization how to get your home or office more organized, and dealing with clutter and disorganization. Generally track for finally is our business development track, which is for those looking to build or grow their businesses more effectively and efficiently. I know many attending will be professionals, executives, coaches, consultants, authors, bloggers, podcasters, professional organizers, developers and creators who are looking to expand their businesses. So this is an online into growing your skills in that department. We also have ample opportunities to interact live with one another. We were planning networking opportunities during productivity summit. So it's about learning and building community, we're all more productive when we all know how to be more productive. We also have an area we're calling the game room, which is where we'll have some digital interactive, where you'll be able to actually take the lessons from your sessions, learnings and put them into immediate use productivity summit is free to attend. It's all accessible virtually through your web browser in my free community platform into which everyone who registers will be invited. The point of productivity summit is to bring us together in real time that life happens and we all won't be able to attend the summit live. We will provide replays of the sessions through Sunday evening, October six 2009 us eastern time, so you can catch Miss sessions or rewatch sessions you found especially helpful. Otherwise, you can buy access to the 2000 19 summit video replay library, which will be available after the summit closes. It's available now and early bird pricing. It goes up as we near the summit, and again after the summit replays end. So grab the replay package before the price increases, if you think you'll need it. All right. As you can imagine, I'm thoroughly excited to bring you productivity summit, and I'm going to get back to work on making that happen. I hope to see you all at productivity summit. Please share and spread the word about productivity summit to everyone you think maybe interested. The more the merrier. Again, you can learn more about the productivity technology organization and business experts from around the globe speaking at productivity summit, and register to attend at productivity summit dot work. We hope it's the most productive two days of your life. I know it will be for me.

Voiceover Artist 3:40 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:57 And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 4:08 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Art Gelwicks 4:10 And I'm Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:11

Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to the productivity cast listening community. Today we are going to be talking about ending indecision. That's what we're going to do today, we're going to conquer indecision. And we're going to talk actually, about what decision making is in the context of personal productivity and how indecision affects our personal productivity. And in the second part of the show, what I hope will do is to talk about some of the various ways in which people make decisions, some of the decision theories that are out there. And then we'll blend that into how to overcome indecision. And the third segment of the show was talking about really some of the, the heuristics and the methods that we have used and have helped others use in the process of being able to make good decisions when those decisions are difficult for us. So let's start off with defining decision making. And what is indecision? How do you all how do you define decision or indecision in the context of personal productivity?

Augusto Pinaud 5:14

indecision in the world of personal productivity specifically goes to you have all these set of projects and actions and things to do, and you have no clue where to start, where to start, or if you can start. So what that produce instead of pick something and move, even if may not be the best thing to move forward, what happened is, you are paralyzed, so nothing progress, nothing move forward, nothing gets done, because you don't know where to start. Okay, that's how I will define diet indecision on the productivity world.

Art Gelwicks 5:52

This is probably one of the hardest questions that that there is, is what is making a decision. I mean, it's, you know, get up and do something, if you have two things, and you gotta do one of them, you got to pick one. To me, it's what has the greatest return with the the minimum amount of downside. And it's, it's making that determination, determining what's the worst thing that could happen, and then acting on it. Even that's a terrible definition of decision making. There's much better ones out there.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:23

And I think we're all in the same general area, which is that we are trying to identify whether or not to seek out some end. And that's ultimately what a decision is, is seeking out an end. And humans are creatures that love to have closure, what we call psychological closure, we want to have all those open loops closed, we seek out closure and decision is what closure are we seeking out. And it could be in response to fight flight or freeze any one of those responses, right. So most people hear as fight or flight response. But this actually fight flight or freeze, we can actually stand our ground and take action right in the moment. We can flee from a situation and or we can freeze we can we can be paralyzed in that moment. And I tend to believe and we'll talk about this later in the episode.