Time Management: Decisions

I write for Time Management for iPad Magazine, an authority on Time Management. This link takes you to Issue 11, which contains an article I wrote on decision-makng techniques. Here is an excerpt:

“Five seconds before Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield and his colleagues successfully crash-landed their Soyuz capsule onto the steppes of Kazakhstan, Mission Control sent the following command: “close your mouths.” This was a timely and proactive message, given that immediately afterwards, the capsule made contact with earth with the force of a serious car crash. Had the control centre not issued that command loudly and verbally, one or more tongues might have been involuntarily bitten off from the impact. There were too many things for the astronauts to focus on at that point, which is why there was both a checklist, and a person assigned to read the command exactly on time. This was not a moment for decision-making; it was a moment for rote action.

For all humans, time and decisions make uneasy bedfellows, since decisions usually require more time than they are given, and pressure makes the entire process physiologically difficult. Humans are also reactive by nature; we are designed to move instinctively, and the capacity for reasoned thought is still very new to us, collectively, as a species…”

To read more, please click here.