5.7 Prioritize by weighing the value of additional information against the cost of not deciding.
Some decisions are best made after acquiring more information; some are best made immediately. Just as you need to constantly sort the big from the small when you are synthesizing what’s going on, you need to constantly evaluate the marginal benefit of gathering more information against the marginal cost of waiting to decide. People who prioritize well understand the following:
a. All of your “must-dos” must be above the bar before you do your “like-to-dos.”
Separate your “must-dos” from your “like-to-dos” and don’t mistakenly slip any “like-to-dos” onto the first list.
b. Chances are you won’t have time to deal with the unimportant things, which is better than not having time to deal with the important things.
I often hear people say, “Wouldn’t it be good to do this or that?” It’s likely they are being distracted from far more important things that need to be done well.
c. Don’t mistake possibilities for probabilities.
Anything is possible. It’s the probabilities that matter. Everything must be weighed in terms of its likelihood and prioritized. People who can accurately sort probabilities from possibilities are generally strong at “practical thinking”; they’re the opposite of the “philosopher” types who tend to get lost in clouds of possibilities.
SHORTCUTS FOR BECOMING
A GREAT DECISION MAKER
Great decision makers don’t remember all of these steps in a rote way and carry them out mechanically, yet they do follow them. That’s because through time and experience they’ve learned to do most of them reflexively, just as a baseball player catches a fly ball without thinking about how he’s going to do it. If they had to call each of the principles up from their memory and then run them through their slow conscious minds, they couldn’t possibly handle all the things that are coming at them well. But there are a couple of things that they do carry out consciously and you should do them too.
* Source: Principles by Ray Dalio