My Rule of Five
For everything you will want to do there are some many others you have think about, consider and evaluate. This made decision making very complex for me. The advent of the information age certainly added to the information I had to process. Nowadays, even deciding on where to order your next take-out meal can be tiresome. There are all these nice places and then there are all these reviews, adding to it there are the various sources for all the reviews. Once you know what to get and where to get it from, there all these different apps offering the delivery services with different pricing and coupons.
Now writing about this alone gave me a headache. And it was just a dinner. When I was trying to decide on other things in life which have a higher impact than a mundane evenings food, I started to feel lost. Hence I came up with my way of reducing the things to what matters most. These factors I limited to the number 5, simply because I can count it on a hand.
My Rule of Five simply states,
When facing a decision or task, just break it down to a maximum five most relevant factors which are important for you.
Since I have been doing this I was able to reduce a lot of clutter in the mind. Turn my focus on aspects which mattered the most to me. Got along faster with planning and decision making.
Let us see how it works for the dinner order tonight,
- I want something warm
- I am really hungry and want something which can be delivered quickly
- I plan to have my dinner on the couch while watching Netflix
- Nothing fancy and expensive
- Something tried and tested
“Get a Pizza from the nice little Italian restaurant round the corner.”
Now this was not very groundbreaking. As I was going through the 5 factors, I was already zeroing in on what I really wanted at that time. In a different situation the result can be different. But the purpose is to find simple ways of getting an awesome solution.
In the stories to come, I will share with you different situations where I will keep things simple using my own Rule of Five for confronting real life questions.