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Comment by jaysonelliot | Hacker News Reader

I was hoping to see one for my personal bugbear: paralysis of choice.

The most common situation for me is to be faced with a list of projects and tasks that are more than I can handle, and doing any one of them means ignoring the others, which are all equally urgent.

I know all the GTD and Pomodoro techniques and everything else, but it's in my head where the problem lies. Once I settle in to one specific task, I can focus and get into the zone to finish it. But that first step—committing to which thing I'll do—is the hardest one. Hours can go by while I'm avoiding the question altogether. I can literally feel the anxiety in my chest whenever I try to pick one and start doing it.

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In cases like this I use a binary comparison tree:

Task a vs task b: if I don't have an opinion about which I should do, I flip a coin.

Task c vs task d, task e vs task f, task g vs task h.

Then winner ab vs winner cd, winner ef vs winner gh.

Then winner abcd vs winner efgh.

I almost never make it all the way to the end as by round 2 ive considered the urgency and value of every task and the winner is usually obvious.

In the cases where I truly don't have an opinion about any of them, the coin flipping only takes a few seconds and getting started on somehing now is often better than spending the time trying to gather enough evidence to form an opinion.

The trick is in forcing relatively easy binary comparisons vs hard absolute or exhaustive evaluations. Our brains have lots of good hardware to make binary and trinary decisions, but we have to use software once we pass 4 or so competing choices.

It works for me. Ymmv.

The coin flip works surprisingly well for me, and for the exact reason you stated. Given the choice between two options that I can't decide between, I flip a coin. The actual result of the flip is irrelevant, because I'll invariably know which result I want before the coin even lands. It forces me to make a decision in spite of myself.

And if you don't find yourself having a preferred outcome, it means the choices are more-less equal, so coin flip will still save you time.

>>flip a coin

That's actually the best test. Flip a coin and then for a moment no matter how small when its in the air, you will hoping for a result. Work on that option.

I have the same issue, and I solve it by offloading the burden of choice to someone else. My wife is a project manager at a company, while I'm self employed; so I give her the job of scheduling my tasks. It's very refreshing to just open your tasks software, see what you have to work on next, and just do it. No overhead of wondering which task to start with.

Your approach is my favorite. I've had an assistant in the past to do just this kind of thing, but now that I'm doing a startup, I can't afford to do it anymore.

It would be great if there were a matchmaking service that teamed people up to do this for each other. I find that it's a lot easier to schedule someone else's tasks than your own—I'd love to trade task-making responsibility with someone else.

I get the same problem, and I use my calendar as a weapon against it. If you have three things you need to do, pick one and block a time off on the calendar to focus on it and ignore the other two. After that it's the calendar telling you what to do, not your own self doubting brain.

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