3 tips for making decisions like a pro
It’s hard to know where to start when thinking about creating an online presence for your company. Even if you get along well with technology, it can be overwhelming. If technology intimidates you, the thought of getting your business online can be paralyzing.
I believe that it’s difficult is because there are so many decisions to make, and so many small steps to take. If you’re like me, it’s easy to get stuck in the weeds of each decision; in situations like this, I often feel like each decision is a major one and making the wrong decision could bring catastrophic failure to my business.
No.
The only real mistake you can make here is letting your indecision become your decision.
Sheena Iyengar, a leading expert on choice, says that being decisive in the face of too many choices is one way to empower yourself. Otherwise, as anyone who has ever attempted to purchase toothpaste from Target knows, too many choices can become paralyzing.
Truly, decision paralysis is a real thing. Forbes suggests a three-step approach to avoid it:
- Pause and ask one good question.
- Insist on three options.
- Talk to five people.
In the context of making the list of decisions necessary to launch a business in the digital world, you might consider this modified approach:
- Pause and consider what is most important. For example, when trying to choose a URL, is it most important to you to have a .com, even if it’s really long, or is it most important to you to have a short URL? More than one thing will likely be important, but which detail is most important?
- Narrow the field to three choices. In this arena, there are usually way more than three choices. Pick your top three, then compare them to each other. For example, when trying to select an email autoresponder service, there are at least 8,532 to choose from. Instead of learning about all of them in detail, pick the three that rise to the top of your initial research. Then, look for a matrix comparing the features of each. Refer back to step one, where you decided which feature was most important and pick the service that best addresses that element.
- Get some feedback. Talking to five people about each of the choices you’ll need to make might be a little much. But, running your thoughts past someone you trust or someone who knows a lot about the topic at hand can be really helpful. Message boards and Facebook mastermind groups are also a helpful tool for this — if you’re trying to decide between the three choices you’ve narrowed your list down to, why not toss a question out to a group of people who have wrestled with the same decision? A word of caution, though: You’ll probably get more advice than you need. Ultimately, keep in mind what is most important to you.