In the military, we had sort of ready-made memes for dealing with decision anxiety. In leadership schools it is taught with more seriousness, but in the field (so to say) we would just refer to it as “making a (fucking!) command decision”. Since being in the military you have to be prepared for making a decision in a life or death situation, time is critically important. So it was drilled into us to make any decision if we have significant and/or crippling anxiety about the choices to be made. If a bad decision is made, so what? Suck it up and press on (another military turn of phrase). You can correct for it later.
One vivid example was when I was in charge of the military ceremony for a somewhat well publicized funeral. An airman had been killed in Afghanistan (funerals for active duty members pretty much get the full production for a funeral, like what you would see in some epic war movie). We had a plan for where everyone would be during the funeral, where and how we would carry the casket, etc. Of course, like the greatest plans of mice and, well, you know, the hearse pulled up in a place where we completely did not expect it to. This was no time to sit down patiently and redraw our plan, so I had to make a command decision and change things at the last minute to make sure it looked like we knew what we were doing.
A takeaway from this would be to give yourself a time limit for making a decision. People seem to refuse to make a decision if they have too many options; time should be factored in as a sort of 4th dimension of decision options. Paring down possible options should also include trimming the time limit to make the decision. That might make the decision process easier.
In the military, we had sort of ready-made memes for dealing with decision anxiety. In leadership schools it is taught with more seriousness, but in the field (so to say) we would just refer to it as “making a (fucking!) command decision”. Since being in the military you have to be prepared for making a decision in a life or death situation, time is critically important. So it was drilled into us to make any decision if we have significant and/or crippling anxiety about the choices to be made. If a bad decision is made, so what? Suck it up and press on (another military turn of phrase). You can correct for it later.
One vivid example was when I was in charge of the military ceremony for a somewhat well publicized funeral. An airman had been killed in Afghanistan (funerals for active duty members pretty much get the full production for a funeral, like what you would see in some epic war movie). We had a plan for where everyone would be during the funeral, where and how we would carry the casket, etc. Of course, like the greatest plans of mice and, well, you know, the hearse pulled up in a place where we completely did not expect it to. This was no time to sit down patiently and redraw our plan, so I had to make a command decision and change things at the last minute to make sure it looked like we knew what we were doing.
A takeaway from this would be to give yourself a time limit for making a decision. People seem to refuse to make a decision if they have too many options; time should be factored in as a sort of 4th dimension of decision options. Paring down possible options should also include trimming the time limit to make the decision. That might make the decision process easier.
You could call those military uniforms ‘decision fatigue(s)’ ha ha ha