Ryan's Rules #59: Clarity leads to better decisions

Did you ever agonize over a simple decision? Whether to get full-fat milk or skimmed. You’re standing there with both in your hand and a precious five minutes pass when you could have just put one into your basket and moved on. Two milk cartons were staring you in the face, but really, it wasn’t which milk to choose that caused the paralysis. You were thinking about something bigger. A promotion or changing jobs, maybe you’re planning on buying a new car. You’ve done the research, tons of it in fact. Sixteen different articles, countless reviews. There’s a pros and cons list written down somewhere. All that, however, seems to have led you to a place where you are more stuck than ever.

When your mind is full, whether that’s because of lots of tiny problems or a couple of chunky ones, it’s because of clutter. Your desk at work or home can have the same problem. It’s incredibly difficult to find the pen or exact tool you are looking for when they’re disorganised and messy. Mental clarity is the same as this physical mess. If things aren’t right, then the simplest detail can derail you.

Close your eyes for a moment and consider this: do you have a clear space where you can think or a mental junk drawer where you can’t find anything?

Why The "Obvious" Advice Gets Skipped

Most people will nod along when they read this rule. They’ll smile when someone tells them to tidy their desk and then not do it. To support decision making they’ll immediately use the habit of drowning the decision in research and opinion. Of course they do. Doing research feels like progress. You can inform decisions by doing research. It’s definitely not procrastination. Clearing up your desk doesn’t help you find something specific on it, does it? Read that again. If what you are looking for is on the desk, it does. But if it’s not there, then you’ve got to look elsewhere. With a clear desk you’d have known right away.

Likewise, sitting still and asking "what am I actually trying to solve here?" might feel like doing nothing but it will actually help you more than you know. Sitting still is the start of clearing your mental workspace.

I know your instinct will be to resist this advice. Research is important. It helps the decision! But therein lies the rub. More information does not bring more clarity. It’s the equivalent of piling stuff onto your desk. I’ll also admit, I tidied my desk less than a month ago and the clutter built up again. I know my favourite Uniball pen is right in front of me but I can’t see it without searching for it. I know something is there. There’s no decision to be made, but it still takes me vital time to search for the pen. So consider, how bad will it be if you have to decide something as well?

Information without clarity is noise

Many small things can build into much bigger problems. Recently, I’ve been agonising over which small form factor desktop to get to replace my laptop. Imagine you were me: you could go cheap and cheerful and get a device a little bigger than a mobile phone. Or you can read fifty different reviews of AMD Strix Halo devices, watch hours of YouTube videos and create a spreadsheet of the different options. Guess what, you still won’t know which one is right for you. Really the decision is a simple one. I know I need something to replace the laptop, I just never defined what the "right" device was in the first place. Do I want fast graphics, does portability matter, what about price, beyond a browser and my productivity suite what are the things I want to actually do on this machine? Being able to run local AI models, rather than having a glorified web browser machine, is great but until I have a clear rationale, every new data point just adds to the information overload.

There’s a pattern here. The more options and inputs you stack up, the harder and worse your decisions get. Your brain can remember about seven concurrent things at a time. It’s just not built to hold all the different variables. The good news is, however, you can act on a clear signal. And you can act quickly.

Why We Get This Backwards

Business and personal advice has always included "do your research." The more data and higher quality your data the better outcome you’ll get. This caused spreadsheets to get bigger, market research to go deeper, and decision-making it turns out got slower and shakier. It’s like we collectively decided that making mountains out of molehills justified our time and energy instead of striking while the iron was hot based on experience, clarity and good judgement. The fear of getting things wrong becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Behavioral economist Herbert Simon coined the idea of "bounded rationality" to point out what should have been obvious. We don't have infinite cognitive bandwidth. Our decision-making is limited by available information, cognitive capacity, and time. We aren’t machines so we can’t compute every variable. Instead we look for a "good enough" outcome and pit that against a clear standard. So if clarity, our clear standard, is missing, what do we do? We either freeze or default to whatever feels safest.

In any given situation we’ll have incomplete or limited information, only some capacity to think about the problem and there will always be limited time. So we need a filter. A shortcut that lets you make the most of the limited resources described by bounded rationality. Clarity is that filter.

How to Build Clarity And Decide

This is where most advice can get vague, but let's give it a stab. Try this for your next meaningful decision. You can start with a small one to test it out and then move on to big ones once you have a good sense of how well it works for you.

1. Name the actual deciding factor. Spend 20 minutes writing down every question underneath the surface until you hit one that resonates. "Should I take this job?" is surface-level. The real deciding factor might instead be "Will this new role give me the opportunity to grow without burning me out?" 
2. Identify your non-negotiables. Write down three to five things that, if they went wrong, make your decision a solid no, no matter how good everything else looks. Put a number next to each one (a salary floor, a commute limit, a date by which you need an answer). If a factor can't be written that specifically, it's a preference, not a non-negotiable. Cut it from the list.
3. Separate facts from feelings. Draw two columns on a page 1) Facts and 2) Feelings. Under Facts, write only things you could prove to someone else (the salary, the commute time, the notice period). Under Feelings, write the fear, the excitement, the guilt, whatever's there. Check your non-negotiables against the Facts column only. If a non-negotiable only shows up in Feelings, it's not solid enough to decide on yet, go find the fact behind it or drop it.
4. Set a deadline. For those tasks that are self-motivated, work to a deadline instead of keeping things “progressing” without end. Know when to stop researching and start eliminating the noise. Set a deadline for the end of the week for bigger things or end of the day for little things. 
5. Ask a friend or pretend to ask a friend. Asking someone independent of the process will force you to clearly describe the problem. It can also give you insight from someone not mired in the middle of the process with too much information. If you can’t or won’t trust a friend, use Rubber Duck debugging. Explain the problem to a rubber duck. Often mid-way through the explanation the clarity will come.

If you do these five simple things (even if the rubber duck doesn’t make a guest appearance), you’ll often find you already knew what you wanted to do.

Clarity Usually Requires Less Information, Not More.

If you have researched too much, contradictory signals will emerge that compete for your attention. No single signal will stand out as the deciding factor. So adding a fifty-first opinion to fifty others won’t actually create clarity, will it? It’ll just make everything inside your head that little bit worse.

The best move is to deliberately stop collecting input once you've hit a reasonable threshold. Then spend the limited energy you have to dedicate to the task filtering what you already have against your non-negotiables. Just like minimalism, less things and not more is usually the better path to clarity. If you associate thoroughness with diligence this is going to be uncomfortable. A decision made without clarity isn't a thorough one.

To attain knowledge, add things everyday. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.

– Lao Tzu

There are a few traps that can show up when you drive for clarity. As you’ve read, mistaking activity for progress is the biggest one. Doing more research ends up spending more time procrastinating on making a choice and doing something.

Outsourcing the decision to consensus is another. In the corporate world I always refer to this as Death by Committee. If you ask enough people for a decision you won’t get a clear one. Don’t get me wrong, when you have the decision made, gaining consensus is a great way to move things forward, however, if you are asking for input, you’ll get people who tell you “their opinion” but don’t actually say anything of value. Or worse, you’ll run out of the allotted time in a meeting and some cheery soul will suggest that it’s discussed again next month. 

Lastly, it’s also easy to confuse clarity with certainty. Certainty is not what we are aiming for here. Clarity is the input to a decision. It doesn't mean you're certain of the outcome, just that you're certain of your deciding criteria. If you are waiting for certainty you could well never decide at all. You need a decent measure of background context, experience and gut feel to get to a point of certainty. 

Where This Leaves You

Clarity leads to better decisions because it makes some uncertainty bearable. When you know what problem you're solving, the decision might make itself. Choosing is easy. Seeing clearly enough to make a good choice is the hard part.

So the next time you find yourself stuck, paralyzed by lots of reasonable options, step back before moving forward. Close the tab on that fiftieth article. Delete the YouTube videos from the Watch Later list. Ask yourself what you're really trying to solve, and notice how quickly the fog lifts.

Tidy your desk now. Find things more easily and do the same for your decision making process. If you have a decision you're struggling with, try clarity instead of another article.

I'd love to hear how it goes. Drop a comment below, rubber duck conversations especially welcome!