Decision making and commitment

I'll be 35 next week and also struggle to make important life decisions or commit to things.

For those that I have managed to sustain or commit to, I've often chunked them into phases, categorised as an experience, or tricked myself into deferring the decision-making element onto someone/thing unknown [ possibly fate?]. 

My own example: Instead of deciding if I should get into more student debt by studying a masters course after years on zero-hour contracts and working in (hellish) public-facing roles, I set myself the goal of *applying* for a master's course, carefully reminding myself that it would really be the admissions team that would be making the decision for me, either by accepting or rejecting me.

Near the end of the masters course, with a dismal labour market in the city I lived, rather than outright deciding if I should move for work, I sent applications out to companies that advertised jobs I liked the sound of regardless of location. I told myself it would be down to the recruiter / hiring manager to reject my application, invite me to an interview, or even offer me a job. I was simply expressing an interest in the job by applying. If invited for an interview, my attending is a signal that I would like to get to know more about the role and team more...I could withdraw my candidacy at any point and they could also turn me down at any point.

This chunking /deferring the decision has sometimes lead me to do things that when I look back I think were pointless (£650 on weekly 2-hour language course straight after work in the dark of winter... attempt to buy a flat that took months and ended up falling through and wasting a load of money I won't get back) but at least I can console myself in the knowledge I tried and have lived a life more interesting and engaging than moping around wishing things were different.

Obviously, that trick doesn't help with decisions only you can make alone...but they tend to be few and far between ;-)

I question a lot of things and if I can't decide, my default is often no, as then I can't get things wrong. I am glad however that my parents did encourage me to do things I wouldn't have the energy to do now.

NAS69281 said:

I'm talking about big life decisions. I cannot make them.

The approach I use is to list the options open to me in any given situation where I need to make a decision. For each of these I write a few notes on pros and cons then open a spreadsheet and create a comparison list where each and every option is evaluated using weighted critera.

For example if you had the choice of doing a MA law conversion course then I would create criteria such as:

1 - financial
2 - long term benefit
3 - short/mid term stressers (eg for the duration of the course)
4 - impact on current responsibilities
5 - travel and attendance requirements

For each of these I would give a weighting based on how important they are, so I would estimate that the long term benefit would be a high value, say 10. Financial is lower so long as it is sustainable so I would give this a 2, travel requirement would be low for me so a 1, and the stressers would also be low for me as I can manage them effectively.

You will need to adapt the values for your situation.

Each of these is a positive or negative (if any has both then they need to be calculated in finer detail) and at the end you can add up all the values to see if one option is significantly higher in value than the others.

Having this list to refer back to helps me a lot when I question if I made the right decision.

Personally I go into a lot more detail about how much of an issue or benefit each is and use weighting of the importance to multiply the "cost" by the weighting. So if the financial overhead was a big issue and I would go into debt then this would be both a big impact and a big priority for me so it would end up as a much bigger number - sometimes taking a loan or getting a grant can offset this so it is easy to recalculate the totals.

This process helps me think through all the details around it and feeds into the brainstorming I use for actually planning the thing in question.

It is a process you need to play with a bit to get the feel for it but helps a lot for quick decision making for major things - at least for me. I use it a lot for buying houses for example so large sums of money are involved and this helps me decide with 10 mins whether or not I make an offer and at what value.

I'm 64 and I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up, I just let things happen, put myself inthe right place and let the universe decide, it usually does anyway regardless of input from me, so why bother trying to anticipate it and worry about it?