Are you delaying decisions until they're made for you?

Earlier this week, a friend was visiting from Sweden for a few days. She’s pregnant, just a couple of months to go, and she and her husband are discussing names. She told me that in Sweden, you can take your time—you don’t have to register your baby’s name until it’s three months old. But at that point, it’s a hard deadline—if you don’t file your baby’s name with the tax office, you’ll be fined, and the tax office will choose a name for you.*

There's a lesson in here somewhere!

If you’re like a lot of people out there, you might have a tendency to put off making decisions until they’re made for you. You dither until the deadline for grad school applications passes, so there’s no chance you’ll be going in the autumn. You debate throwing your hat in the ring for a promotion at work for so long that they choose someone else, someone who actually applied. You don’t read a library book you borrowed on Libby, but you don’t return it either, so one day it just disappears from your Kindle (OK, I am guilty of that one!).

Putting off decisions until they’re made for you often feels like the easy way out. You just linger and muse and procrastinate until you have no choices left.

But doing nothing is also a choice.

I understand why people delay decisions! There’s fear of regret, of choosing the wrong thing, of having to take responsibility for a choice that doesn’t work out the way you wanted (this can range from moving your whole family across the country for your job to picking a new restaurant for dinner and it turns out to be terrible). It can feel simpler just to let the decision simmer, or wait for someone else to make it for you.

But what about regretting the decision you didn’t make? The residency you didn’t apply for, the potential friend you didn’t ask out for coffee who then moved away, the book you never quite made up your mind to write?

Delaying decision-making comes at a cost. The first: your time, your energy, your brainspace. Months of debating and deliberating that come to nothing. The second: those opportunities that you missed because you were too busy making pros and cons lists!

So, what can you do?

I’ve learned over the years that this kind of refusal to make a decision often means you’re not happy with ANY of the choices you’re considering. You’re not sure you really want to go to grad school, for example, but you’re also not satisfied by the job you’re doing now.

Zoom out, and think bigger. Ask yourself: “If I could do anything I wanted right now, what would it be?”

Maybe you want a new career. Maybe you want to travel the world. Maybe you want to have a kid more than you want either of those things.

In your answer is the thing you should do.

Maybe it’s getting a dog. Maybe it’s a new job. Maybe it’s Thai food.

Either way, determining the thing you actually want is the first step to creating motivation. It’s a lot easier to go after the thing you’re sure about than it is to keep considering sub-par options.

*I have a few Swedish cousins and I texted one to ask about what happens if you don’t choose a baby name in three months. Was it really true the tax office would name your baby? He texted back: “That’s sounds accurate. It will be SVEN, ABBA (gender neutral) or LOTTA.”

Honestly, I believed this until he said he was joking. ABBA is not a name commonly given to Swedish children 🤣. Any Swedish readers able to weigh in on tax office names for babies? Let us know!