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Comment by deweller | Hacker News Reader

Here's some advice for people of all genders:

Learn to make decisions immediately and quickly.

By laboring over a decision for hours or days, you can unintentionally turn a trivial task into a heavy one. By making decisions quickly you save yourself all the extra emotional and mental labor.

Sure you will make mistakes, especially as you are learning to do this. But you will get better at it with practice. It is a skill worth pursuing.

I understand there are some decisions that should not be made quickly. Learn to recognize those decisions and create a system for yourself for processing those in a reasonable amount of time. For me, choosing which housecleaning service to hire is not a decision that should be labored over.

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I agree that this is an important skill to cultivate, as well as the ability to sum-up approximate costs accurately and quickly. That said, I do think that when we are looking at adding a regular, recurring cost to our budget we would be well advantaged by doing the requisite research. In the case of a cleaning service, it's possible (perhaps even preferred) that they'll be performing this service when no one is home. In my own experience, I have found a shockingly wide variety of price points when looking for such a service.

My own rule of thumb is to get three estimates, hopefully at least one from a company or service that was recommended by someone I know personally.

> not a decision that should be labored over.

Getting the right service is obviously important to her. But that doesn't mean the decision should be labored over -- the cost of a wrong decision isn't high; if you don't like the one you hired, just try another one.

Paradoxically, sometimes the only way you can get enough information to make the "right" choice is to make a choice in the first place. If it isn't a one-time choice, the downside is generally minimal.

One of the great tricks to learn when making decisions is that if it's taking too long to choose then the difference between the choices must be small enough to practically not matter. Make a choice, Any choice. Flip a coin if it helps.

This is the number one skill I've been trying to learn at work. Too many minor decisions add up and severely hurt productivity if they aren't resolved quickly.

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