Any expert will tell you, “Deal with things once.”
Force yourself to make a decision. Be efficient. Stay ahead of the details. Don’t let them build up. It sounds so simple.
When you try it, you find it’s half-baked advice.
Life isn’t so simple. You may be able to handle a lot of things once, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with having that as your goal, but who’s kidding who? There are lots of things that pop up in your life that you just have to think about for a while.
Also, issues come up that require decisions. But that doesn’t mean the first time you’re made aware of them, that you have all the facts necessary to make the right call. Getting those facts takes time.
Just making a decision, with no information to base it on, so you can “handle it once”, is to create a lot of future nightmares for yourself – simply because you made a quick decision – rather than waiting until you got the facts to make the RIGHT decision.
There’s a right way and wrong way to hold off on decisions.
First – Don’t let too many of them accumulate. It’s like spinning plates: the more plates you have spinning, the harder it is to keep on top of them. The more likely you’ll get sidetracked, and let one fall and break.
Second – Don’t take too long to decide. Opportunities and problems have a shelf life. Opportunities not acted on eventually fade away. Problems that are ignored eventually mushroom and turn into nightmares.
“There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecisions.” —William James
Being indecisive is like a plane circling an airport in a holding pattern – you can’t stay that way forever. Eventually the plane will run out fuel.
