Decision Making
This week, an article on decision making as parents by the one and only Emily Oster. Let’s first start off by acknowledging that parenting can sometimes feel more like a logistics manager than an all-loving caretaker. And the number of decisions, from what schools to what to eat for breakfast, is vast. Oh, and decision making can be fatiguing.
Oster suggests that ‘giving into the loudest whine’ isn’t a great way to make these decisions. Okay. Instead, she suggests making deliberate decisions with a structured process. She derives her recommended decision making process from her days as a business school professor, and like any good business school professor, there is alliteration involved - The Four F’s: Frame the question, fact find, final decision and follow up.
Frame the question: make sure you’re asking the right question - if you’re considering a family vacation to Bali, the question of whether to go is moot if you don’t first answer: can we afford to go? can the kids take time off of school?
Fact find: here is where you go do your research. Mileage may vary. Oster of course goes deep here because that is her jam. I would caution from my business days that more data does not correlate with better decisions.
Final decision: make the decision! It is probably useful to decide when you’re going to make the decision before you do your research in an effort to not go down the rabbit hole.
Follow up: set time to review the decision. This review is useful for learning and improving your decision making going forward.
Oster suggests making sure what is important to each family member and to the family as a whole is an important part of decision making. I will phrase a different way: if you can make 1 decision that prevents a deluge of other decisions, that’s a win. And it will give you more time for the higher-level decisions.
For example, if you’re making a ton of decisions about kid activities, you could make some higher-level decisions and eliminate 90% of the decisions: you could decide that every kid in the family gets to do one activity at a time, or no activities that interfere with school or dinner time, or that you only participate in school-sponsored activities. A great article on this principle here by Greg Mckeown, the guy who wrote two best-sellers on prioritization and simplification.
I will add one additional concept for decision making, which is the Whole Body Yes. It turns out your body is pretty good at making a pro/con list and weighting things correctly based on your past experience and data you’ve collected. So, when it comes time to make the decision, check in with your body - is it giving you a 👍👎?
And because I’m passionate about it, Oster also suggests making sleep a non-negotiable in decision making. Also, you’ll make much better decisions with sleep:)
“We can never know whether our choices are right. But every parent can have the confidence to know that we made the choices in the right way, that we did our best in the moment. And that, itself, should deliver comfort.” -Emily Oster
