How to Make a Good Decision Every Time
I have to make lots of decisions every day. I have to pick headlines, edit copy, schedule certain pieces of blog content, decide how to best accommodate other units in the company, and make tons of other decisions. I’m sure most of you are in the same boat.
The decisions that are the most time-consuming are the ones I have to make regularly, sometimes several times per day—like how to handle emails from customers. I have to forward the email to customer service, answer it myself, or sometimes kick it up to the product development team if it’s a good suggestion. These routine decisions aren’t time consuming because they’re hard to make; they’re time consuming because they’re important and need to be given my full attention.
Define your decision-making process
Like all productive people, I want to get things off of my desk as quickly as possible. One thing I’d like to do is handle these routine decisions more quickly—it would also be helpful for other people on my team who need to make the same decisions to handle those as quickly as possible. So what did I do?
I started making decision trees to help automate and streamline my decision-making process for routine decisions. Take a look at the decision tree that I made for handling the occasional customer emails that I receive via the feedback form on Working Smarter:
What does this thing allow me to do?
What this decision tree allows me to do is:
- Map out all of the possible factors that I have to account for in my decisions;
- Pre-determine all of the likely outcomes for a decision;
- And determine the process at which I arrive to my decisions.
Essentially this is a decision-making process, illustrated in graphical format. Now for something as simple as answering a customer’s email, I wouldn’t need a decision tree because there really aren’t that many possible outcomes or possible factors.
When should you use a decision tree to streamline your decision-making process?
You should use a decision tree when:
- You have to factor a large number of items into your decision;
- You have a large number of possible outcomes resultant from your decision;
- Or you have a team of people who need to be able to replicate your decision-making process.
My example of replying to customer emails is pretty simple—you probably wouldn’t need a decision tree for it. However, if I had to make a more complicated decision like determining whether or not to add a new feature to our product, then a decision tree would be quite helpful.
Actually, that’s a pretty good example – on Monday I’ll publish an in-depth post which will show you how to build and use a decision tree from top-to-bottom using that example.
If you want to try making your own decision tree then download a free trial of SmartDraw.
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