Making decisions

Method for making important decisions

If you find it hard to make important decissions then you can follow this method to come to the best conclusion. The principle is quite simple and involves making a two column list of all the pros and cons of your decision.

The first step is to translate your decision into a question that has only a yes or no answer. For example if you need to decide whether to sell your house or not then you would phrase your question "should I sell my house?". You then need to get a piece of paper and write that question at the top. Now draw a line down the centre of the paper dividing it into two collumns. At the top of the left collumn write the word pros and at the top of the right collumn write cons.

The next step is to list every pro you can think of in the left collumn. All the reasons why you want to sell your house and all the benefits need to be listed here. You then do the same with the cons collumn on the right. Think of every reason why it might not be a good idea or all the negative elements to your dicision. A good way of helping you to think of all the pros and cons is to ask yourself lots of questions in your mind. For our example you might ask yourself questions like:

What will happen if I do chose this?
What will be different in my life as a result?
How do I think I will feel about this change?
How will it affect other people in my life?
Will it affect the quality of my life?

It doesn't matter if you have more cons than pros or more pros than cons just as long as you have thought of them all. Once you are sure that you have every pro and con that you can think of, you then need to give each point a significance value from 1 to 5. 5 being very significant and 1 being not very significant. Try to do this as honestly as possible. It's all very well having a list of pros and cons but some of them will be far more important than other points. This is why you will need to spend the most time making sure you give each point the correct significance. It helps to compare the cons with the other cons and ask yourself "Is this a more important point than that one?" and so on. Try to compare all of your cons against each other and number them accordingly. Now do the same with the pros and compare each pro against the other pros.

Once you have all of the pros and cons numbered with a significance value, you simply add the values up in the pros collumn and write the total at the bottom of the collumn and then do the same with the cons collumn. If the pros total number is higher than the cons number then the answer to your question is yes, but if your cons total adds up to more than your pros total then the answer to your question is no. If you do this honestly and carefully then your decision should be the right one. At the very least it will be the most logical and mathmatical choice.