On a typical week, small business owners must make a lot of decisions. This can include:
How to attract new customers?
How to deal with a dissatisfied customer?
Should they hire this employee or fire that one?
Should they invest in that new equipment?
And on and on it goes….
With so many decisions and incomplete data, many of us already suffer from “decision fatigue” on a weekly basis.
But these past few years during COVID, this fatigue has got a whole lot worse because even simple decisions that were “automatic”, now requiring careful thought. For example, if I want to meet a client for lunch, I must ask myself:
Can I eat outside (where I am most comfortable)? If not, am I comfortable eating inside with the restaurant’s pandemic-related policies? Will it be busy there that day? Am I planning to see more people that have compromised immune systems that week and could I be putting them at risk?
For me, what to consider in making a decision is exhausting!
The scientists at the Learning & Decision-Making Lab at Rutgers University-Newark have learned that the choices people are making throughout the day leads to what psychologists call “decision fatigue — you can end up feeling overwhelmed and make bad decisions. The pandemic can make this situation more pronounced, as even the choices and activities that should be the simplest can feel tinged with risk and uncertainty.”
When people think about taking risks, they try to consider all “the evidence” and then make decision. Unfortunately, with COVID- 19, there is no way to be able to consider everything. Because of the nature of probability, you can’t know the outcome ahead of time and don’t know if your decision will affect other people.
Last month, I ate inside restaurants on two consecutive days only to get COVID three days later. Just because I contracted the virus does not mean I made the wrong decision (I could have got COVID elsewhere that week). Fortunately, except for my wife, no one I came in contact with got sick. After this, it does make me less likely to eat inside restaurants soon.
To help decision fatigue, be patient with yourself. Just like in business, there are no perfect choices these days. You can’t consider everything. All we can do is make the best choice now given what you know. Can you make small decisions so if you fail, you get another chance?
In making choices, I ask myself is it worth the risk and how can I best protect myself and others while taking that risk?
In the process, be kind to yourself and respect others in their choices.
