There’s a lot to be said for the power of simply knowing what you’re dealing with. So what do you do, when you find yourself being battered by a tiny thousand decisions? The key I’ve found is clarity. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve taken the wrong turn on a familiar drive because I’ve been trying to work something out in my head. And because we don’t register them as decisions, we end up tackling them on the fly, reactively, at the last minute – and more than likely whilst multitasking. What we dismiss as insignificant becomes a plague of locusts, or perhaps less dramatically, a ton of feathers. When we don’t register these tiny decisions, we don’t see them coming – and we don’t see them piling up. Don’t even get me started on trainers, bus routes and mouthguards! Those were just three of the thousand tiny decisions I had to make over the summer. The decision I hadn’t planned for though, was which configuration of RAM, hard drive, CPU – and once that was decided (less storage, more RAM), it then opened up a whole other set of decisions on external and cloud storage solutions, not to mention the massive file decluttering & re-organising I had to do before I could even migrate my data to the new machine. I’d already made the decision to replace it with a much lighter, travel-friendly MacBook Air, and as there was an Apple store close to where my parents live the decision of where to buy was pretty easy. ‘Replace laptop’ was one that sprung up when my laptop died rather unspectacularly (again) whilst on the road, after being fixed just months before. ‘Book train tickets’ required checking what time my parents would be happy for us to arrive, which station to travel to (the mainline one or the little one closer to them?), deciding whether to travel before, during or after lunch time and what to feed the kids if eating en route. ‘Buy school trousers’ for example turned into a hunt on the internet for the one supplier that explicitly advertised ‘charcoal grey trousers’ only to find when they were delivered, that they were exactly the same grey as every other supplier. It’s not until we try to do them that we realise there’s even a decision to make. Book train tickets to take the kids to stay with mum & dad. They appear deceptively as simple tasks on our to-do list: Buy school trousers.
Tiny decisions, on the other hand, can bypass our decision radar completely. We do our research, evaluate, weigh up options, seek help, ask for advice, talk it out, make a list or two (or five)… Sometimes we do a bit too much of that, granted, but we identify those decisions and we devote time, attention and headspace to tackling them. We prepare ourselves, mentally and practically. This is a phrase that has been echoing in my head for the past few weeks, and one the quite aptly sums up my summer.īig decisions we tend to plan for.
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