Try to catch up on years of neglected goals in four days

Decision making is about timeliness, but it’s also about trust.

It’s about having faith in your intuitive choices about what you’re doing. Even if all the data isn’t there, even if you don’t have a strong preference, and even if you don’t have a robust how to support your why.

You still have to be comfortable making decisions in spite of all of that. Believing that you’re making them for a good reason, and no matter what happens, you will survive them.

Otherwise you accumulate negative momentum. With each moment of indecision, your marginal cost of deciding becomes higher and higher. It becomes impossible to regain any semblance of order.

Reminds me of an office mate from a few years back. He never out rightly admitted that he was a hoarder, but it was obvious to everyone. The guy’s desk was covered in a tsunami of papers and folders from accounts he had closed seven years ago. His email inbox had several thousand unread messages. And apparently, he also had four years of back taxes that were never paid.

Robert wasn’t a bad guy though. He was just chronically indecisive. And as it turns out, that’s one of the essential features of any hoarding personality. People who struggle with excessive acquisition, difficulty discarding, clutter and disorganization, literally have a different brain chemistry.

The national institute of health ran a study that discovered hoarders exhibited abnormally low activity in the brain region called the anterior cingulate cortex. Meaning, their native wiring makes it difficult to identify the emotional significance of certain possessions.

Hoarding isn’t about the desire to keep stuff, it’s about the inability to eliminate it.

But that’s why we have deep empathy for anyone with this personality. Who among us hasn’t been in that situation before? We down and convinced ourselves, okay, this is weekend when all the shit we’ve been putting off for years, big and small, is finally going to get done.

Who among us hasn’t spent years letting things fall apart and then gone on a crusade to fix it all in four days? It certainly happens to humans, not just hoarders. Negative momentum.

Our streak of indecisiveness persists for so long that it’s impossible to overcome.

The issue, then, at its deepest level, goes back to trusting ourselves. Not only having faith in our ability to make decisions, but have faith in our ability to survive their consequences.

In what situations don’t you trust yourself?