Decision Making: Hands Off Before Hands On

Most of the time, we encounter a situation where we have to make a decision during some course of action. Let’s assume, we have to decide to complete a task. Normally what we do, we just jump into the task at hand and start working on it. Most of the time it goes wrong or it may take more time. We think that being productive is just doing more and more work. But in fact, you must spend an appropriate time in the planning phase before starting execution. This will help you to reduce your efforts and time.

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Examples

• Let’s suppose you are moving to a new house and you have to set your drawing-room. For that, you have to position the furniture (let’s say you have to adjust sofa-set). So normally what people do, they just drag the sofa in the drawing-room towards the wall and then realize that it is blocking the way, window, or simply it’s not fitting in the available space. So they drag it back and then move the sofa to the right place. In this whole process, they put effort to drag in and drag out the sofa and spend time which is of no use. Instead, if they just planned a bit, analyzed the available spaces, and looked into the consequences before dragging the sofa, they would’ve saved time and efforts.
• Let me share my experience. I am a software engineer, so whenever I had to write the code, I just started doing it. The only thing I knew was the result, so I wrote the code, run it, if it worked, cool. Otherwise changed the code and run it again. And the process continued till I reached the result. This approach wasted a lot of time and created a lot of distraction.

Before doing anything. Take a break and plan.

So how you will plan your task? KOALA is the solution. Let’s see how it can help us to achieve the task with less time and efforts (and definitely with minimum consequences).

KOALA

• Knowledge: Are you well suited for the job? Do you have enough knowledge or expertise in the field? For example; if you have to give first aid to a person, do you have any previous experience with it?
• Objective: What do you want to achieve? What are the exact requirements? Before performing any task, make sure you have understood all the requirements. Sometimes words can have different perspectives.
• Analyze: Once you have defined your objectives, it’s time for deeper analysis. Here you evaluate the different available options that will help you to achieve the goals or objectives that you have defined.
• Look up to the future: Now you have to select the best solution based on the analysis that you did in the previous step. Here you consider all of the consequences that can occur against each option.
• Action: In the last step, you take the action and proceed as you planned.

Conclusion

The key idea is to make the decision with planning not in hurry. A small effort put into the planning phase can help you achieve your task more efficiently. You can adapt the phases mentioned above to plan your task at hand. It may seem that the above tasks are time taking, but it’s not. You just have to spend your time and process all the phases in your mind one by one. Once you start adopting this approach, you will see improvement in your task handling and you don’t have to redo your work again and again.

Redo is a time waster

I adopted this approach in my software programming, I spend time to plan by understanding the requirement completely, then I analyze the possible solutions and after that I look into the consequences or the modules to which this change will affect. And then I choose the best solution and execute it.

If you can relate this approach to your daily life or your professional life. Do let me know in the comments section.

This article is originally posted on my personal blog.