Some Hard Decisions Don't Have to Be Hard

I don’t know that I thought too much about decision-making growing up, because it wasn’t until I reached adulthood that some decisions started to feel genuinely hard. Maybe that’s because as a kid, I found myself within a structure that generations of adults before me had created to guide me toward a limited set of options that would be likely to give me positive outcomes in life. This structure even had built-in assistance for choosing from among those options.

But after the school years end, suddenly there are no longer many clear goals or much guidance. Even more significantly, the paths you choose not to take start to feel more final and consequential, maybe even leaving you with a sense of loss. As a kid, when adults say you can do anything, they rarely help you appreciate that you can’t do everything. For anything you say yes to, you’ll have to say no to many other possibilities.

Decision-making is also a key part of our jobs as project managers. In a way, I find decisions easier in this professional environment because there are clear goals—or if not, you’re justified to stop and ask them to be clarified. And you do have people to help you. But we are still responsible for making judgment calls, and we don’t get a pass from all difficult decisions on the job just because we are functioning within a clearer structure.

In my professional and personal life alike, the decisions I’ve found hardest are the ones where there isn’t a clear best option. I can weigh the pros and cons in my head, or in writing, or even with a team, and the scenarios where the options seem to be of roughly equal positive or negative impact…those are the decisions I’m most likely to get stuck on. Trying to pick the “best” option is the main goal when making a decision, so when you can’t…then what do you do?

After struggling with a number of decisions like this, I’ve come to realize something else: when your best assessment reveals that no option is significantly better or worse, then you can typically just decide to be done struggling, close your eyes, and point. Essentially, if no option is truly better or worse, just pick one.

I don’t mean this dismissively, as your friend might say it if you’re taking too long at the deli counter to pick out a sandwich. But I’ve come to realize that when the struggle to pick the best option finally still isn’t bearing any fruit, it really is better to give yourself permission to end the struggle, choose at random, and walk down a path. In a lot of cases, delaying the decision longer is the only thing that will have worse consequences than acting on one of the alternatives in front of you.

In some cases, especially in your personal life, you’ll probably want to ask yourself, “okay, none of these is better per se, but which set of consequences am I willing to live with?” But if you get stuck there also, the preceding advice still applies: just start walking down a path.

On your projects or outside of work, I can’t really make living with the downsides of your choice any easier or stop you from wondering what would have happened if you’d gone a different direction. But I can encourage you not to struggle any longer when the struggle isn’t adding any value to the scenario and the decision before you. Don’t draw out pain that is meaningless.

You’ve done your best. You’ve thought it through. All your options are roughly equal in positive or negative impact. Go forth and manage your project, or live your life. It is waiting for you, and you have so much to offer.