When you're struggling to make decisions, write out pro/con lists. Throw in best/worst case scenarios too. Be reasonable but don't average it out, pros/cons are already representative of the average. The reasonable best/worst case for a job interview is you get hired/rejected, not you become a trillionaire or die.
Write it all down, however trivial. Then choose.
The end goal isn't to weigh the pros and cons against eachother, although sometimes that helps. Most pros/cons aren't quantifiable in that way.
The point is to turn off the feeling that you're missing something if you make the choice now, that you haven't properly considered the options. The reason you can't decide is almost never because both sides are equally balanced, it's because you're scared you've balanced them wrong, forgotten a critical factor. But you can't have, if you're staring at the list.
If you've actually written everything, you know you can't have made a mistake out of apathy. It's still possible to misbalance an itemized list of pros/cons, or to balance them correctly and still make the wrong call.
You probably will, but it will be because you did so, not because you didn't think about it and were forced into making/accepting a choice by time or pressure or circumstance. That means it was already the best decision the you of that time could have made. Now you know better, and you can improve, but only because you were already working from the best foundation you could build then.
Don't hide behind uncertainty. Sometimes it's real, and you do need to do more research before you can decide. You know when that's true because the list will be full of holes.
But, if the real reason you can't decide is because you're scared of committing to anything, having a list which removes all the other excuses will make that clear. Keep in mind, continously not deciding is also a decision, and it's usually the worst one.
- Rew
Nightly Notes
Pro/con lists are the spiritual predecessor of rubber-duck debugging, change my mind.
- Rew