Some choices we make are hugely influential and others are not, yet we seldom make distinctions when we should. Or at least, we get lost in the importance of decisions that are not important, giving them too much value.
We can spend a couple minutes choosing the right cereal to buy in the store… but both of our choices result in bringing home a breakfast that is loaded in refined sugar.
We can spend hours watching a TV series that is less interesting than it was when we started watching, but we feel committed to finishing the season. We don’t allow ourselves the choice to stop watching. On that note, when was the last time you chose to walk out of a theatre because the movie was bad? You probable chose to stay until the end… but it likely didn’t feel like you had a choice. You think or justify, ‘It might get better’, but it never does.
We can spend hours making a big purchase like a car, then let a salesman talk us into features and add-one we don’t need. Our choice for the car is done, and suddenly we are more easily persuaded and less likely to exercise choice.
How many unimportant choices do we spend too much time on? How many times do we passively do something without giving ourselves a choice to do something different? And how many times do we delay important choices to the point that our choices diminish? For example, you can’t decide what to do, and 2 hours later one of your choices is eliminated because there isn’t enough time to do it.
‘To do’ lists can become not do lists. I will choose to do a few easy things on the list, but those big things will sit on tomorrow’s list. I will write down the things I’m choosing to do later instead of now. I will add more things to the list so that I don’t have to do those things already on the list.
We make thousands of decisions a day. Some are big, but most are small. We also make thousands of non-decisions a day, doing something without realizing we can do something else or choose to do the same thing differently.
What’s something that you can do differently today? What’s something that you can make a choice not to do, that you do out of habit? Where in your daily routine can you empower yourself with better choices?
