Many decisions, big or small, rely and only happen when someone says ‘let’s do it’. It can be a small thing like determining that the price is ok for a flight and booking it, or bigger decisions like changing jobs, or following that dream.
Inherent in making a decision is weighing up the pros and cons. Will there be a better outcome or conditions if you wait a little, or is now the time to close the deal? Over the last few weeks I’ve been looking at flights to New York for October and though tickets are still at a reasonable price they are £250 more than what we paid last time. I’ve hold off for a while looking to see if there might be any campaigns coming up but on Saturday we found some good flight times and on the days we wanted to go so we booked it. Whether we could have got the tickets cheaper if we’d waited a bit longer I don’t know, but the pros of getting them sorted and not having to worry about it far outweighed the value that potentially saving some money could have brought us. Besides, when it comes to flights they seldom get cheaper but only more expensive.
Knowing when that right time is can often be difficult. There are no guarantees for tomorrow and if you look hard enough you can always find pros and a lot of cons for why you shouldn’t do something right now but postpone it. The more options we have the easier it is to overanalyse things and try to find that perfect ‘now’ time. But I’m not sure there is such a things as the perfect time. There will always be pros and cons and if you think to long and hard about something you may end up missing the train, or it could cost you dearly in many ways. Procrastinating over something takes up both energy and thought space and with myself I know that I’m a lot happier if I just make the decision and go for it rather than spend endless time debating wether or not to.
If there is such a thing as the perfect ‘now’ I do think it’s more to do with when that gut feeling comes, it feels right and the pros outweighs the cons. It doesn’t work for everything and some decisions do need more analysis, but as a guide when the excitement rises in you and you want to click that button, hand in that resignation or make the leap, what ever it might be, that’s the time I think is the closest to the perfect ‘now’ that you can get to.
Tomorrow – Day 241 | Working closely across disciplines
Image source: www.flickr.com/photos/35188692@N00/2392520183
