Every day we make hundreds of decisions. Some decisions are easy to make, while others are more difficult or even vital. In most extreme cases you can suffer from decision anxiety. To escape that and not to find yourself in a decision chaos, people have developed various approaches and techniques for decision making. Today I will introduce my favourite one: 4 D’s.
I like the Cynefin framework a lot, but found out it is not helpful in my daily life. I tried several others, until I found D’s. With few small tweaks I created a tool which supports my professional and private life daily.
do it
Task is clearly aligned with your values and beliefs. It supports your goals.
I know my values and I know my goals. If a task supports both, then I do it immediately and with a smile on my face. Life can be so easy and work can be a fun activity!
decide
Task is NOT clearly aligned with your values and beliefs. It MAY support your goals.
It is not clear what it is. When I started to use the tool most of my tasks landed here. Until I noticed that it holds me back and disallows me to pick up speed. After deeper analysis I realised that it was from the beginning clear that it does not belong in the “do it” and even in “decide” pile. I was lying to myself. So the first step here was to stop to disillusion myself.
delegate
Task is important, but it does NOT support your values or goals.
Some part of the collected tasks landed here. With surprise I learned that I have not so much difficulty delegating in a professional context, but mostly in private. Lesson what I needed to learn: I cannot be responsible for everything. And I can not be the only counterpart for a bunch of topics. Starting with “where are my socks?” and ending with “where is my vaccination card?” and “where will we spend our family vacation?”. It was pretty difficult to work through because in my head I was having a self-organised family. My mistake was that at the end I always jumped in and saved the day. No jumping and no saving anymore! If you are legally allowed to drink beer and drive a motorcycle, you are responsible for your socks and vaccination card.
drop
Task is NOT important. It does NOT support your values or goals. NO value.
Majority of tasks I crawled at the end landed here. Needed to do a lot of mindset work and sometimes still do not feel good about this. When I get that mood, then I remind myself to look at the pile “done” and remind myself that I could do all those important things only because I was strong enough to drop all unnecessary and useless stuff.
Life without decision chaos
It has already been more than a year since I started to use 4 D’s daily. Of course there were days at the beginning when I was very sceptical and fell backwards into my old habits. I am very happy that I decided to use it and to stick to it. In those days I paired 4 D’s with wisdom of madam Kondo with “does it spark joy?”. I still have to do some mindset work, but I feel confident about the direction and lessons learned.
Are you interested in the method, but you are not sure about your values and goals? My coaching offer for beginners is shaped to cover exactly that. Additionally until November 1, 2022 I have a special offer. Have a virtual coffee with me and find out the way which works for you the best.