Making business decisions can be challenging when there are so many factors at play. Timing can play a huge role. So can due diligence in vetting every potential decision you could pursue.

But in 2021, we also don’t have time to waste. The markets for everything are the most competitive they have ever been, and business decision-makers must think and act quickly and assertively, so their businesses aren’t affected by inaction.

Analysis paralysis (being paralyzed by the number of choices or directions available) leads to inaction, which is often worse than making the “wrong” choice.

Over-analyzing can cause you to lose out on opportunities, either for yourself or your business.

But making strong and well-informed decisions can be done swiftly and with confidence!

So, here are our tips on how to avoid analysis paralysis this year:

1. Create a decision hierarchy

By prioritizing your decisions, you will be able to easily determine which ones you should make right away and which you can put on the backburner for a while. Otherwise, treating all decisions as priority #1 can lead to analysis paralysis since you usually have more than one request at once.

Determine where each decision falls on the hierarchy by asking yourself how important it is, how its outcome will affect your next steps, and when the decision needs to be made by. Also, what could potentially go wrong?

2. What is the goal of each decision?

If you don’t know why you need to make the decision, there probably isn’t going to be much pressure to make it, is there?

By knowing why, you have to make the decision and associating it with one of your business goals, you’ll be able to know how important it is and why it matters for you to make the decision.

3. Create smaller steps for each decision

By breaking the decision down into smaller steps (and maybe smaller sub-decisions) you’ll be able to lean one way or the other on your final answer.

This way, a big choice isn’t so paralyzing when there are plenty of little factors that help point you in the right direction.

4. Remember that nobody’s perfect

There is bound to be a small margin of error on each decision and you can’t win them all! That’s part of business and part of life – making mistakes.

But not choosing the “best” decision doesn’t mean you failed. It just means you can use that feedback for your future decision-making, so they become even more accurate.

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All in all, analysis paralysis or simply “not choosing” can seem like a better option than making a mistake, but you need to remember that no one would move forward if they didn’t make large and small decisions on a daily basis.

Make sure to split your decisions into smaller steps, do the proper research, and finally, act before it’s too late!