Making your mind up

• By Jason Fried and David Heinemeier
• 25 Jul 2009

When you put off decisions, they pile up. And piles end up ignored, dealt with in haste, or thrown out. As a result, the individual problems in those piles stay unresolved.

Whenever you can, swap “Let’s think about it” for “Let’s decide on it.” Commit to making decisions. Don’t wait for the perfect solution. Decide and move forward.

You want to get into the rhythm of making choices. When you get in that flow of making decision after decision, you build momentum and boost morale. Decisions are progress. Each one you make is a brick in your foundation. You can’t build on top of “We’ll decide later,” but you can build on top of “Done.”

The problem comes when you postpone decisions in the hope that a perfect answer will come to you later. It won’t. You’re as likely to make a great call today as you are tomorrow.

An example from our world: For a long time, we avoided creating an affiliate program for our products because the “perfect” solution seemed way too complicated: We’d have to automate payments, mail out checks, figure out foreign tax laws for overseas affiliates, etc. The breakthrough came when we asked, “What can we easily do right now that’s good enough?” The answer: Pay affiliates in credit instead of cash. So that’s what we did.

We stuck with that approach for a while and then eventually implemented a system that pays cash. And that’s a big part of this: You don’t have to live with a decision forever. If you make a mistake, you can correct it later.

It doesn’t matter how much you plan, you’ll still get some stuff wrong anyway. Don’t make things worse by overanalyzing and delaying before you even get going.

Long projects zap morale. The longer it takes to develop, the less likely it is to launch. Make the call, make progress, and get something out now— while you’ve got the motivation and momentum to do so.

Excerpted from Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson © 2010 37signals, LLC. Reprinted by permission of Crown Business, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group.

Written on:

25 Jul 2009

Categories:

Best Practice, Time Management