Outsourcing Decision Making
and having your defaults.
Supposedly everything is done as a result of some decision somewhere. It’s a nice way to feel autonomy or after a while—decision fatigue. The daily routines and habits also take place so that one does not need to come to a halt every moment. Your identity and who you feel you are and should be, or want to be, guide or limit a number of decisions.
You may be someone who upon hearing the alarm in the morning remains indecisive for a long while on whether they should get out of bed or notIn “The Ipcress File” (1965) Michael Caine keeps the alarm clock at the other end of the room. Behavioral design to remove the option of staying in bed. His coffee making routine that must result in something horrendous is another story.
. After getting out of bed there’s a need to pick something to wear and if breakfast is in order then what to have for that. If you’re not careful, you can manage to put a lot of time and energy, almost before your day begins, on what should already be solved issues. After all, these are things you do almost every day you’re alive.
Since the decision fatigue is often desired to be avoided, having decisions made for you remedies that. However, it’s also a remedy for feeling in control. To get around this, it should be you that decides, but you decide in advance. It’s always 5:45, a specific porridge depending on which day it is, and the outfit for the day is picked out by a script and set out by you the previous nightIn university I had enough of standing in front of the wardrobe while missing breakfast so one night I took inventory of the articles in there and wrote a script to generate the combinations for me.
. I would note here that it is perfectly valid to decide to be indecisive and to take the time in the moment. It’s freeing to know that there’s a decision that has been made and that can be used. The idea isn’t to never deviate in these decisions, but more about to have these as defaults or fallbacks. If you’re feeling as if you cannot come to a decision, the default is there to help you out. If the choices don’t have too much weight, roll a die, such as picking what to eat from a menu. After all it’s just one meal and you may learn something about your preferences to guide a similar decision the next time.
In “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” Richard Feynman tells the story on deciding on a dessert and which university he would be at. After reading about him deciding on the dessert is I believe when I opted to apply this concept more widely in my life—in search of all the nails with this new hammer. It would always be black ink for writing and drawing, 3B and 8B pencils, only ever one cup of coffee and in the morning, apple jam before every other kind, what brand and gauge guitar strings for each guitar. Ever since, it has remained near the surface in my mind. Every time I decide on something however small, it feels like I’ve solved some part of my life. At the same time none of this is irreversible. I watch films in the order I add them to my watchlist. I can always jump around, but I don’t need to mull over what to watch next. Whenever I think about going for a run, I go as soon as I can. If I have time to fill I fill it by reading a book if I don’t have anything more pressing.
One neat side effect of this is that sometimes it results in this nice consistency or harmony, e.g. when all your clothes are black, there’s no fear of the colors clashing. David Lynch seems to only have black suits and white shirts in his wardrobe. They always match. It’s his uniform so he can make decisions about his films and not about what to wear.
Another effect is that of constraints, artificial limitations, which is sometimes beneficial for creative endeavors. There’s all this freedom within some borders and nothing can get in the way of you creating.