It's easy to spread your focus on way too many things. The array of communication and productivity tools we dispose of give us the illusion that we can multi-task indefinitely. We could track six projects at the same time, or follow-up with twelve people at once. We could extend our control on every detail of a project, reach out faster to ever more people.
Deep focus is scarce and valuable. Distractions are everywhere. The tyranny of choice is the most dangerous risk to the analytical minds. Picture choosing between many unfamiliar jams on a supermarket aisle. Or, researching all possible flight itineraries, even with the most exotic connections that none of the aggregators show. The simple choice of arranging the logistics of a weekend trip could take us more than polynomial time. Search problems are notoriously computationally hard without indexing.
Some decisions matter but are unimportant. After all, Ford does not makes its tires. It buys them. Ford's customers need and value tires, but don't care about them much relatively to the car. What's more, it may always change the tires supplier.
Here we could reference Amazon's high-velocity decision-making: "There are one-way and two-way doors in the labyrinth of choices".
Most of the doors are two-way. We can always go back through them. We can change our mind, rewrite our path. These decision are to be taken quickly, without waiting for all the sufficient information. There's not really the need to risk-adjust them. The sunk cost of slow decision making is worse. The advice here is disagree and commit: hear feedback, incorporate it and move forward.
Then, there are one-way doors, the non-reversible choices. These are to be taken slowly, methodically, consciously. We don't always know which door is which. Sometime a choice can be both. These are not neatly mutually exclusive categories. Time does not flow backwards, but is sending any message really a one-way door?
Lists, short and well-curated lists come to the rescue. They give us immediately a constrained probability distribution. If we need to choose an option in a list of three, suddenly the complex information gathering task is already handled. There is a Benedict Evans article that recently resurfaced in my internet explorations:
All curation grows until it requires search. All search grows until it requires curation. @BenedictEvans (December 18, 2015)
Our mind is an oscillating pendulum between the ordered fews and the uncountably many. We are guided blindly by patterns and stories. It hurts me saying it but our mental maps can be so vague, that sometimes the best way forward is to follow the beaten path.
Talk soon,
David