85 | Simplifying with Decision Filters

Feeling overwhelmed by the countless decisions you face every day? Our latest podcast episode is here to help!

Decision fatigue is a common struggle many of us face, but it doesn't have to be that way. Decision making is a skill. It's built through repeated exposure to the discomfort required to choose a way forward when the future is unknown. 

In today's episode, I explore the concept of decision filters and how they can help streamline your thoughts, decisions, and processes. I'll share actionable questions to help you adopt your own decision filters, reducing mental clutter and focusing on what truly matters.

Tune in now and start making your decisions easier and more effective.

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MENTIONED:
The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller

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Transcript

Intro: Welcome to A Pleasant Solution, Embracing An Organized Life. I'm your host, certified life coach, professional organizer, and home life expert, Amelia Pleasant Kennedy and I help folks permanently eliminate clutter in their homes and lives. On this podcast will go beyond the basics of home organization to talk about why a clutter-free mindset is essential to an aligned and sustainable lifestyle. If you're someone with a to-do list, if you're managing a household and if you're caring for others, this podcast is for you. Let's dive in.

Amelia: Welcome to Episode 85, “Simplifying with Decision Filters.” Hey y’all! The leaves are starting to fall, but it’s been 95 degrees all week. Personally, I consider it summer through the end of September. I think the temperature dictates the seasons more and more these days rather than the calendar. My three children are all back to school. Each has a different schedule and a different location. It’s a delight! In all seriousness, because they’re teenagers now, I hand off responsibility around many planning and preparation activities to them. I’m steadily letting go of control of the details. It feels good to trust them to navigate their days and experience the consequences of any small errors.

I’m glad to have more space in my days to think about my business and my clients. One of A Pleasant Solution’s three core values is simplicity of time, space, and being, so this Fall, I plan to review what I’m offering and how I’m operating on a day-to-day basis then simplify even further. It’s a form of editing. Just like you’d edit your closet, I’ll be editing my business. My listeners and clients crave simplicity, so that’s what I aim to deliver.

Which brings us to today’s topic of decision filters. In my own mind, I have the tendency to over-complicate things. If you can relate, feel free to smile. It’s something I know about myself, so instead of trying to change that quality, early on in my life I decided to work “with” it. I practice simplifying my thoughts, my decisions, my processes, my relationships – basically all the areas of my life – on a regular basis. Sometimes simplifying is top of mind for me, and sometimes I have to pause and actively remind myself to make my next steps more straightforward and less complex.

I understand decision making can be a challenge for some and close to debilitating for others. Today’s offering is meant to encourage you to start wherever you are and to seek support if making decisions drains more of your energy than you’d like. Decision making is a skill. It’s built through repeated exposure to the discomfort required to choose a way forward when the future is unknown. With each decision you make, you build emotional resilience. As an organizer trained in chronic disorganization, I know that for some, our neurobiology and internal makeup can inhibit the ease of decision making. Please know that you’re not alone and both trained coaches or mental health professionals can help you get unstuck. It’s work I love to do.

So, in today’s episode I’ll share what a decision filter is and how I use them to clarify my purpose, my next steps, and or my space. I’ll offer a few questions I find myself regularly asking and encourage you to adopt a few of your own. Having a few decision filters in your back pocket is a great way to calm the noisy mental clutter and focus your attention on the most important elements of the choice ahead. You might have a few you already employ but just don’t know it!

Alright. You’re most likely familiar with the effects of daily decision fatigue. Decision fatigue sets in when you’re fatigued, at capacity, or routinely the default decision maker in your home or workplace. It’s when your brain feels muddled or mushy. It’s when you’re circling around a choice rather than seeing a relatively clear path forward. To be clear, decision fatigue is totally normal. From the moment you wake, you’re tasked with making thousands upon thousands of tiny decisions – what to wear, what to eat, what time to leave, whether the battle with your kids or housemates is worth today’s energy, whether to take a mini-break before your next call. Decision fatigue is buddies with overwhelm, and together they feed on the friction in your days.

A decision filter is like a fine mesh strainer. It’s a tool. Think about making a pot of tea. A strainer is needed to separate the tea leaves from the tea. In your brain, a decision filter operates similarly. It strains out the best idea or most practical or strategic way forward from all the other average choices. A decision filter is a powerful open-ended question that reminds you of your priorities or values so that you can do what’s best in the moment with the information you have. It’s a way of practicing the fact that you’re more organized than you think.

One of my clients, a professor, dreaded grading her students’ essays at the end of term – not because she didn’t enjoy her work, but because of the amount of time grading each essay took. She found that grading 20 essays took hours and hours. She hadn’t yet decided on a time limit dedicated to grading because she had a belief that each student deserved her best. It was a perfect scenario for deciding upon and implementing a decision-making filter in order to simplify the quarterly grading process.

First, we coached and used curiosity to uncover what she meant by each student deserving her best. Instead of keeping this a generic concept, she asked herself, “What do my students need in order to improve their efforts and understanding on their next assignment?”  This allowed my client to identify the top 3 things that each student needed from her when receiving feedback. I encouraged her to formulate a rubric – another tool for simplifying decisions – to judge each student submission by. By establishing a rubric, or a set of guidelines for whether an essay was excellent, met expectations, or was lacking key qualities, she was able to quiet the internal friction she experienced when reviewing each essay and grading it against the course standard. Next, we set a time limit on how long she’d spend on each essay.

Decision filters eliminate friction. So, the best place to decide if and where one is needed is to look for an area of your life where you’re experiencing a high amount of internal or external friction. For example, if you find it hard to choose something to wear each morning – either because the closet is overflowing or because there are a mix of sizes and types of clothing – you could implement a decision filter to declutter the items that are leading to friction. Returning to the closet each morning, grumbling, spinning, trying on multiple things doesn't solve the issue. That keeps you stuck. Too many items to choose from makes getting dressed harder than it needs to be.

One question filter I like to start with is, “How can I make this simple?” Just like the professor’s paper-grading rubric, you can decide to keep only the items you’ve worn in the last year. You can decide that anything you pull off the closet rack must be tried on and looked at in a mirror. If your heart doesn’t sing or smile – for whatever reason – when you look in the mirror, the item needs to go. No excuses or sentimental reasons. Simplifying your wardrobe starts with being honest, looking in the mirror, and reminding yourself that you deserve to look and feel good, and by letting an item go moves you towards a more simplified closet and friction-free morning routine. The answer to that question may be hiring an organizer or having a friend act as an accountability buddy while you work through this one closet. Oftentimes the answer to “How can I make this simple?” is to give ourselves permission to do things just a little differently than we may have done in the past.

I have a client who felt like time was always a challenge for her. It escaped her. Sometimes tasks took longer than she thought. Sometimes she found herself behind on projects. Day in and day out she felt she wasn’t being productive enough in her job. And she was a lawyer. Lawyers bill based on time spent. Her firm required her to enter hours spent into a timesheet each day, yet because she’d internalized a belief that time was a challenge for her, she employed a decision filter based on Gary Keller’s one thing question.

In short, Keller suggests you “find the lead domino, and whack at it until it falls.” His question helps you identify both the source of the friction and actively eliminate it by clarifying your top priority. He encourages you to ask yourself, “What’s the ONE Thing you can do… that by doing it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?” For this client, capturing hourly data about how she was spending her time was the proof she needed to chip away at the belief that time was a challenge. She got a notebook. She defined her working hours. She set alarms on the hour for those working hours. She committed to stopping each hour to quickly reflect on the hour. It was hard at first. The alarms would ding, she’d be irritated, and sometimes she’d record her time, and sometimes she wouldn’t. Yet, she discovered that reporting her billing was much easier when she had a record of what she’d been up to that day. Instead of wondering or ruminating, the data was there… and it proved time wasn’t a challenge, if she diligently tracked it in her favor.

So, to recap, you can ask yourself, “How can I make this simple?” You can also ask, “What’s the ONE Thing I can do…?” It takes you out of the land of overwhelm and decision fatigue and brings the task back into focus. Instead of all or nothing or a million and one answers, decision filters help your brain key into the essential next step.

If you’re a regular listener to this podcast, the final decision filter I’ll offer will sound familiar. I use it multiple times a day. It’s the question, “What do I want?” It’s one that can feel a bit awkward at first, but trust me, the more you practice, the easier your answer will be. It’s a decision filter that allows you to get curious about your inner desires and find alignment in your whole being, not just your head. The last client example I’ll share was looking for better boundaries with her in-laws. They were generally disagreeable and difficult to be around for long periods of time. After exploring the dynamics of their relationship, my client began to understand that not only were her in-laws not going to change, but that she’d been giving them power over her emotional experience by expecting them to behave differently.

By thinking deeply about what she wanted, she was able to break away from the common belief that having connection with her in-laws was important. What she wanted was for the extended family to get together, but to do so on her terms. This allowed her to limit the number of days a visit consisted of, to allow the in-laws to spoil her children but not stick around every moment to witness it. She gave herself permission to go to the gym and see friends rather than perform the stereotypical (and ultimately unhelpful) role of a “good” daughter in-law. By asking herself what she wanted, she was able to let her in-laws be themselves while meeting her own needs and filling her own cup. In turn, when everyone was together, she could be much more civil and present, things that were important to her.

Before I sat down to outline today’s episode, I employed two of these decision filters myself. First, I asked myself, “What’s the one thing I want to complete today in order to feel successful?” The answer was going for a long run. Then I asked myself “What do I want?” when it came to attending my son’s soccer game this afternoon. Yes, I wanted to attend. Yet, I knew that completing this episode was the area of friction that would keep me from being present and enjoying his game. The podcast episode was the priority, and if I completed my work, I’d absolutely attend. Decision filters help you move through the noise of your day, if you’re willing to be honest with yourself when answering.

So, in conclusion, get curious about your biggest area of friction right now. Ask yourself a few open-ended questions to explore how to simplify that monster of a task, project, or life transition. Promise yourself that you’ll be kind to yourself no matter what you decide. Because, at the end of the day, it’s not about the decision, it’s about simplifying enough that you keep on going. Talk to y’all soon.

 Outro: Hey y'all, let's connect and chat on socials. You can find me on Instagram and Facebook @apleasantsolution. I'm also on LinkedIn at Amelia Pleasant Kennedy. Feel free to send me a quick note and let me know what you'd like to hear more about, or what home life organizational challenges are top of mind for you. Talk to y'all soon.