Decision-making is the defining form of labor for our age. Outside of obvious blue-collar contexts, nothing we do is physically very difficult any more, but it is emotionally so — hence the term “emotional labor”, something I first heard from Seth Godin.

The point is this: finding and implementing ways of handling, compartmentalizing, widgetizing and otherwise improving your emotional labor, your decision-making performance and efficiency, isn’t a manifestation of being goofy or fragile or over-analytical or “sooo Millennial”. It’s just us realizing and dealing with what work and life is nowadays — an endless series of decisions.

And that’s mmmkay. Scratch that, it’s awesome. It’s a great place for us to be, both as individuals and as a more-or-less global civilization. It does still require our attention, though. Similarly to how matter and energy are neither created nor destroyed, simply transformed, automation doesn’t eliminate all work, it just shifts it up to higher levels of abstraction.

We’re still on the hook to work, but it’s a type of work that is easier to turn into play than perhaps any other that has ever existed — if you know how.

So, one time, I had to make an appointment with the vet, for my cats, to get special shots for them so I could take them overseas, by plane, and thus have them hang out with me…overseas, as one does, and then also safely and expeditiously return to Japan.

Now, I had ten choices for an appointment time.

No…wait, that’s not what it was. It was a massage place. I think. They actually come over to your house and do, like, sports massage (roll with it) and…anyway, yeah, I had, like, ten options. And too many commas.

1. 16:30 Today
2. 17:30 Today
3. 18:30 Today
4. 19:30 Today
5. 20:30 Today
6. 21:30 Today
7. 22:30 Today
8. 23:30 Today
9. 24:30 Today/Tomorrow
10. 25:30 Today/Tomorrow

As you can see, my evening was wide open. And I kind of wanted to keep it that way; I didn’t want to pick a time that I might end up hating. Plus, what if some of my friends wanted to hang out suddenly? So what was I to do? It was a classic Barry Schwartz, more-is-less situation — so many choices, so much abundance, so much freedom, so much goodness that it actually makes you feel, well, bad, right?

Wrong.

All decisions are binary. And all the decisions that aren’t binary can be made binary. Here’s how I did it:

1. I realized that what I had was a sequence of binary decisions to make. So I did a “reverse” binary fission — a weird, binary fusion-fission mix (there’s probably already a name for this and I just don’t know it; if you know, please tell me, so I can actually learn something for once!).
2. First I chose between
   1. option 1: timeslots #1~#5 and
   2. option 2: timeslots #6~#10.
3. I picked option 1: timeslots #1~#5
4. Then, since that left an odd number of choices — five — I simply picked the middle one, #3.
5. End of story.

Choosing between ten options thus turned into choosing between only two options, two or three times in a row. The same would have applied even if I had started with a number of choices that is a power of two (and were thus always dealing with an even number of choices). So, sixteen options turns into two options of eight, turns into two options of four, turns into two options period.

Eleven options is odd, so it’s a straightforward “pick the middle” (#6) situation.

Put more generally, then, when faced with dozens of choices, you simply group them up (fusion) and then start choosing between increasingly smaller groups (fission) until you’re down to your one choice. In so doing, you keep your fish in a barrel, that you may shoot them then and there; you don’t let them out all over the lake. I imagine this process could even work when making biggish life choices, like what city to live in next. The group you keep probably contains your true top favorite. Will your results always be perfect? No, but they were never going to be anyway . It’s more important to make decisions well than it is to make good decisions; you can always re-decide — even tattoos can be surgically removed — but you can’t unwaste your time and energy, the very stuff of life itself.

Have you ever had a dream where you had fun, but you also wished you had acted crazier in it instead of spending three quarters of the dream time picking cereal and/or tortilla chips in the supermarket? I literally have dreams like that all the time. In a way, real life is that dream (yeah…it just got weird in here; I’m getting Matrixy on you; don’t be shy — you know you love it). You’re weighing options instead of living them. You’re picking books instead of reading them. You’re picking movies instead of watching them. You’re thinking about girls instead of making out with them. You’re reading game reviews instead of playing them. That doesn’t seem like it’s how life is supposed to work.

Motivationwise, if I were to overanalyze it, I’d say that I probably have some kind of guilt-driven need to weigh every choice in detail just because I have the choice. Does that make sense? There’s this feeling that the fact that I have an option means I must do “due diligence” on it, in order to find out whether or not it’s the best, otherwise I’d be wasting a “perfectly good” option; I’d be “missing out” and/or “messing up” somehow. It’s sort of like sampling every single kind of ice-cream at an ice-cream parlour just because they say you can. Yeah, you sucked up all the “value” you could, but so what? You just get all full and don’t really enjoy yourself. ¹

This kind of trying-to-be-optimal “choice hoarding” actually turns out to be the most suboptimal thing you could possibly do; it produces the most fatigue and the least happiness. If you really want to be happy, it seems like the trick is to throw out some of your choices ASAP. Take them out of the Reeves-Hopper equation (there’s a Sandra Bullock joke in there for the diligent). Kind of like how if you really want to live happily, you don’t fill your house with stuff even if you have tons of space.

Binary decision-making — decision binarization — gives you the feeling of having considered a choice, and thus exercised your freedom to the fullest, without the temporally and cognitively wasteful burden of actually running through a full mental simulation for it. It is absurd to attempt to actually weigh every choice you have, just as it would be absurd to even consider opening every page that Google sends you back in search results; as it is, you probably don’t even open all of the first ten. So apply some googolic wisdom to your real life and stop overthinking everything — because you can’t and even if you could, it would not be a good thing. Remember, there will be a next time; you will get another shot. This is not a movie; in real life, the chances keep coming, and when they go, new ones fire right on up and take their place. Make your “best bad” decision now and run with it.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably noticed that decision binarization is really just a highly specific form of satisficing: “Aiming to achieve only satisfactory results because the satisfactory position is…hassle-free, and secure, whereas aiming for the best-achievable result would call for costs, effort…”. A satisficing algorithm, if you will.

In the end, then, Barry Schwartz and I are pretty much on the same page…I’ve never actually read his work in detail, though. My impression, unsullied by actual research, is that he wants choices reduced for us by default? I like to be the one doing the reduction, though. There’s a world of difference between being forced to live healthily and choosing to do so. It’s only discipline if you choose to do it, anything else is just oppression. Like, I choose what English words to use, but I don’t want English to actually have fewer words just because some apparatchik decided so. I choose what to buy; I don’t want there to actually be fewer options period *cough* rhymes with Bamazon Banada *cough*. Having said that, I’d appreciate less crud out of the box on Android phones and Windows computers; imitate Apple’s core genius, not just its surfaces.

P.S: The massage itself was really good. Massage, for me, is always one of those things I fuss about whether or not to get beforehand (latent miserliness — it feels so decadent), but never regret after the fact. I mean, there was that one time in 2006/2007 where the guy was, like, cuh-lueless — almost as bad as a massage chair…no, worse: it was like being bullied by a legally registered bullier — but other than that every single time has been super good. As a matter of fact…

“Don’t make the right decision; make the decision right”
Dunno who first said it, but I heard it from Ali Brown

Once, a little while ago, I can’t be bothered to go look for the exact comment text but, a kid asked me something to the effect of:

“Khatz, why are you so clued in on human flaws and pitfalls when it comes to getting used to languages and other long-term projects and stuff? Are you just awesome or did you go through these yourself, or…?”

The answer is yes. Haha.
Indeed, I am pretty awesome. But, yes, the reason I’m so clued in on all the mistakes is because I’ve made them, if not in one field, then in another.  Most of the insight comes from experience + observation rather than pure observation. Thinking about it, I certainly wish I could be perfect, and I do spend a lot of time projecting perfection — which, frankly, is very emotionally immature. But even more than that, I wish I could be more courageous about projecting imperfection. For me personally, as a consumer of information on people’s experiences, I find accounts that lay the subject’s imperfections bare much more reassuring, relatable and inspiring.

The snob in me looks down on the “culture of confession”. But the sweetheart in me feels emboldened and more worthy and like much less of a noob, when reminded that non-noobs used to be noobs. As it turns out, if you dig deep into the stories of people who’ve achieved great things, who’ve topped and/or dominated a field, you often find that they overcame apparently insurmountable odds; they came from a position of “you have no right to be here”; “you don’t belong”; “you shouldn’t even consider entering this field” and moved to, well, the very top.

Professional sports is replete with examples of this phenomenon. You get world champion runners like Billy Konchellah and Jackie Joyner-Kersee having severe asthma, Wayne Gretzky being derided as too small and too slow to ever amount to anything in ice hockey, Michael Jordan being dropped from his high school team.

Arguably, the obvious “talent”, the sure thing, the “born superstar”, clear as mud for the whole world to see, is actually the exception rather than the rule. Almost everyone starts off scrappy and unlikely and pretty much looking like a loser, but the legend of their greatness gets ret-conned after the fact. Perhaps anything else would force as all to think (and work — haha!) too much.

Of course, sports has high visibility, but this phenomenon comes up in all kinds of places. So many people were inspired by want in youth to become fabulously wealthy (the “Horatio Alger Effect”, if you will) that many middle-class people started to believe that being raised in poverty was a prerequisite for major wealth! Now, that’s probably taking it too far. The real lesson is, and here I go using poker-based clichés even though I’ve literally only played the game once in my entire life — it’s not the hand that’s dealt, it’s how it’s played.

TL;DR: The reason why I’m writing to you today about making decisions is because I’ve gotten pretty good and pretty fast and pretty happy at doing it. But only because I was so bad, such an emotional wreck (yeah, I was a total be arch) even picking cereal at the grocery store, that I went out and deliberately absorbed, copied, refined and developed all sorts of techniques and heuristics, including timeboxing and, now, “binarization“, to get over it.

Now, it physically pains me to admit this. I was so different back then and I would rather not remember how I used to be, because it’s so embarrassing and because I would never want to return to being that way again, but…more than once, I spent hours — hours — at the video store picking movies to rent to watch that weekend. Yes, enough time spent picking a movie to actually watch a movie. Ridiculous. And tiring. And very unsatisfying. And this happened more than once. And the stupid movies were only a buck each — 100 yen rentals, man! Sometimes, for multiple weeks at a time, they would even have 50-yen specials. And do you know what I did? I SPENT LONGER PICKING! I SPENT LONGER PICKING WHEN IT WAS CHEAPER. I spent more time for less money; if that isn’t bass ackwards, I don’t know what is.

The video store thing is just one example. There are many others.

But that was then. This is now. Reading and learning have been good to me, so things have changed in big ways. Now, friends and acquaintances are frequently shocked at the speed with which, I, say, order food at a restaurant. I’ve gone from abnormally slow to abnormally fast, driven by the crippling slowness and enlightened by other people’s insights on the mechanics and value of decision-making.

And the restaurant thing is just one example. The effects, the benefits, the habits of fast and relaxed decision-making have bubbled up from trivial things like that to even bigger things. Paradoxically, though, the very banality and triviality of selecting a dish at a restaurant or picking a movie to watch turns out to be important. If I recall correctly, it was Cyril Northcote Parkinson (of Parkinson’s Law fame) who said that the time devoted to making a decision tends to be inversely proportional to the importance/value of the thing being decided. That assertion never fails to hit me like a fast-moving vehicle. And never fails to remind me that a lot of what you think are major roadblocks are actually just pebbles in your shoe. But just like real pebbles, they can affect your life far out of proportion to their size.

Here’s another concept to add, I’d like to think it’s an original idea but it probably isn’t: the quality of a decision is not proportional to the time taken to make it — not for long anyway — diminishing (and even negative) returns start to kick in real darn fast. In fact, the quality of a decision isn’t even proportional to the amount of information known. As Nassim Taleb has discussed, people famously get worse at successfully picking stocks the more information (data points) they’re given. So, giving a decision more time isn’t going to make for a better decision, and nor is collecting more data — not to the extent you probably think.

On a related note, some neurological (?) research has suggested that we actually make decisions very quickly and almost completely subconsciously — and irrationally — but then spend all kinds of time rationalizing, ratifying and testing the original quick decision. Some researchers have gone so far as to postulate that there is no such thing as free will, which is a thought-provoking but decidedly distasteful idea.

Without going into too much detail on it today, the idea that we already, subconsciously or pre-consciously or whatever, know exactly what we want and what we’ll like and what will work best for us, was really helpful in disabusing me of the linear illusion of “more time = better decision”.

Anyway, the latest research goes back and forth and takes a while to settle down, and that’s not the point I was even trying to make. So, enough making myself look bad and trying to be “relatable”. Gosh. So lame. You know I’m actually perfect and flawless, right? Anyway, to the point let us get — all decisions are binary.

You think you have to choose between 10 things. In reality, you only have to choose between two. There’s an unintentional joke in there somewhere. You only ever have to choose between two things.

All choices are binary. There may be more than one binary choice to make, but each individual choice is actually binary and thus easy.

All so-called “difficult choices” are (if not pure, self-created emotional drama) simply long chains of multiple binary choices. So it’s not that it’s one choice between 10 or 100 things: it’s 5, 10, 20, 100 or more choices between 2 things at time, and you’re overwhelming yourself by treating it as one, big choice. You’re trying to swallow an entire hamburger and you’re choking and you wonder why.

No matter how complex and realistic things look or get on your computer screen, it’s all binary numbers. Just lots of ’em. Similarly, no matter how big and intractable your decisions look, it’s all binary decisions, just lots of them.

For the sake of sanity, I am deliberately excluding dramatic, imminent life-or-death choices; those are off the table. Almost none of us make those choices on a daily basis. They are unhelpful outliers whose perceived frequency is distorted upwards by movies and TV news. Not to mention comic books. I spent a good deal of last night reading American comics. Way too much drama.

My only fear is that now I’ve told you that there’s no excuse, I’ll have to follow my own advice and actually practice what I preach . Because If there’s no place to run or hide for you, there’s none for me either. It’s bad enough that I’ve never consumed alcohol or narcotics: I can’t pretend that I was drunk — when I grope you or insult you, I know exactly what I was saying or doing…

…I’ll find a way out . Anyway! Yeah. At some level, this is the same as the idea of chunking or “binary fission” — cutting in half until you get to smaller and smaller pieces. The difference is that binary fission is more a top-down, task-based thing rather than a bottom-up, decision-based…thing. Decision binarization is also similar to David Allen (GTD)’s idea of “action steps” versus “projects”. Many people conflate the two, treating projects as action steps, treating a multiple decision chain as if it were one big, bad, permanent, monolithic decision. This results in a lot of unnecessary blockage, trepidation and avoidance behavior.

Realizing that decisions are binary has helped me the most in situations where the outcome is not pre-determined, where creativity is required and the goal state is somewhat fuzzy and not already defined — where I’m inventing things more or less from scratch, basically — such as when writing or programming. Again, often, it amounts to pebble removal. When writing or translating, word choice used to be a constant, almost nightmarish, ordeal for me until I came up with a little heuristic: “when deciding between two words, pick the shorter one. If they’re the same length, pick the one higher (= that comes earlier) in alphabetical order”.

Focussing on one small, clear decision at a time makes the whole picture much clearer over time, one step at a time. Almost by definition, to focus on one thing is to exclude another. But this is a good thing. We can only make small decisions (without being overwhelmed), but we only need to make small decisions. So the implication is that we need never be overwhelmed (at the very least, we need never stay that way). Panic may be heartfelt and endearing, but it’s never helpful.

Deciding things so clearly and quickly and unambiguously doesn’t make me “happy” or “satisfied” in the “yeah…this was the right word” sense, but it makes me productive, light, free and easy, all of which does make me happy. It gets things out of the way, which would seem to be the opposite of “enjoying the process” and “enjoying the moment“. But you and I both know that certain elements of the process — metaphorical pebbles — can vary rapidly outstay their welcome and cease to be enjoyable. They may have started out as roses, but they turned into…I dunno…thorns? Make that one make sense for yourself .

Many (most?) of us try to make better decisions, when really what we need to do is make decisions better. The point of the word choice thing was to make a decision and move on. I didn’t pick shorter words because they’re intrinsically better (although some people think they are): length just happens to be a quick, easy  and universally applicable way to compare words. It’s the best bad idea. As Parkinson would have put it: the fact that you even have doubt to begin with indicates that either option will do, because if there were a clear winner, there would be no doubt (you don’t decide whether or not to breathe or avoid oncoming vehicles). Picking what language to learn (first) is the classic example of this.

So, binary decision-making stops blocks — stops stoppage — and helps create forward momentum, and, as all good AJATTeers know, having momentum is generally more important than having good ideas. Course can be changed easily, but getting started is a witch.

Anyhoo, that’s all I can think of to say about this right now. You’ll probably have a ton of questions and I’ll be happy to answer them in the future. Or maybe you have something you do that has helped you make decisions better. We’d all be excited to hear your story .

Look closely at any of the problems people bring you (or you bring yourself) and you’ll see that at the core, what you’re stuck not between a rock and a hard place, but between a sofa and a beanbag.

If you can read this, you are a member of the global elite: you have electricity, running water, literacy in a socio-economically powerful dialect and all that that entails. And so basically all your problems are first world problems.

Which, as my friend CJ likes to say, doesn’t make them any less vexing, but definitely does make them not worth sweating about.

Which language should I learn first? What activity should I do first? Should I keep this SRS card, or toss it? Zounds, iTunes isn’t syncing my songs properly!

Listen to yourself.

This kind of horrible indecision wears you down, and leads to stupidity like spending half an hour choosing what to eat at restaurant. Just pick anything that sounds good and pick something else next time. There will be a next time.

That’s how I like to think of it right now. Maybe it’ll work for you, maybe it won’t. I dunno. But here’s how I roll: Assume you will get to do it all. Assume you will get to learn it all, taste it all. Just assume. Assume you have infinite time and resources but that this moment, this time window, this timebox, is finite. There is only one luxury you cannot afford: the luxury of worry and indecision.

Now you’re no longer choosing what to do or even when to do. All you need choose is what to do first. I would add that it’s important to not try to make the best choice here. Pick that low-hanging fruit. Narrow it down. Make the easy choice. The choice that feels good, that feels “you”; you’ll know which choice is the easy choice because you’ll feel guilty for it. ¹

Most of us are socialized to extend morality into places where it doesn’t belong and thus feel guilty about otherwise neutral things just because we like them. So if you feel guilty, you’re probably on the right track. If it makes you feel any better, it only seems easy to you because it’s your thing: “easy”, like “delicious”, is relative. So go for it already. Go for easy.

So you’re no longer choosing or even scheduling per se. You are merely sequencing. There’s no guilt because you’re never rejecting a choice, merely re-sequencing it.

Don’t choose what to do. Just choose what to do first. Just choose a little something something for here and now. Later, you can and will get to make more choices, new choices, even better choices. Assume you’ll get to do it all, because, at the rate your life’s going, you basically will.

Back in the (“AJATT Hardcore”) day, I never felt deprived of English because I wasn’t. I was just doing Japanese now. English would still be there; English-speaking friends would still be there, and I could come back to them any time. Life is surprisingly long — in a good way — there’s time enough to do what you want if you just pick what you want (for that time) and do that…run with that…for a while…see where it takes you; you will get to pick again.

I think there’s this sense that each decision you make somehow decides things for eternity and that simply isn’t the case. Outside of the most dramatically ridiculous examples that too much movie- and TV-watching would have you imagine, each choice you make only lasts forever if you keep making it forever. Each choice turns out to have a limited window of effectiveness (like the range of a bullet) and so you get a near-infinite number of chances to do it over.

All those dramatically awesome examples of people turning their lives around are just a manifestation of this phenomenon: the fact that choices actually have quite a short effective range; you do not have to be in for a pound just because you’re in for a penny — you get a bunch of pennies and with each one you get to choose.

Admittedly, most people either don’t consciously exercise their power of choice (they let inertia and the environment choose for them — i.e. they choose to repeat previous choices), or simply choose worry and fretting and indecision. But that certainly doesn’t mean they have no choices: wasted time only exists because there is enough time to waste; wasted opportunities only exist because there are so many opportunities.

Don’t make the best choice. Make a doable decision now knowing what you know now, using what you have now. There will be no regrets. Regret is just information you didn’t have at the time. Using that information against yourself is just you being a jerkwad to yourself. You know what you know now; you have what you have now. Take that and run with it.

OsakaWilson

“If you’ve got all the information and it is that difficult to decide between them, it doesn’t really matter which one you pick. The reason you can’t decide is because one is not sticking out as better for you, so just pick one and do it.”

• Can’t pick a language?
• Can’t pick an SRS score for that card?
• Don’t know whether to use Surusu or Anki (hint: pick Surusu; I’m totally not biased )?

Then eff it. Pick whichever. The fact that you’re undecided means it doesn’t matter which you choose. How do I know? Well, in the course of your daily affairs, are you ever undecided over whether or not to breathe? No. Why? Because one choice (breathing) is obviously better than the other (not breathing).

The problem is choice. The problem of choice. The problem is there is no problem. Indecision just means any will do.

But…but…but…what if I know more later? What if I find out something later that will make me regret the decision I made?

Yeah. Key word: later. You will know more later. There will be another choice, dozens, millions of choices to make later. But only if you act now based on what you know now. Move on.

I know. You’re afraid you’ll make “the” wrong choice and “regret” it. But regret isn’t regret. Regret is just information you didn’t have at the time. But you only live in the present and you only have the information you have in the present. You only know what you know now. Don’t be a jerkwad to yourself. You have no way of knowing what you will know in the future. So you have no reason to regret anything. You (probably ) can’t cry time into regressing. And you (definitely) don’t need to.

Act. Push the [x] button on the PlayStation controller of life. Sign the treaty. Decide. Make the cut. Take the shot. Move on.

Make a choice now. Make new choices later.

“It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires a great deal of strength to decide what to do.”
Elbert Hubbard

“The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward.”
Amelia Earhart

Action is easy. It’s not like you’re a coal miner. What do you do, really? What does the actual work in your life consist of? Click here. Shuffle paper there. (In all likelihood), be you student or stock broker, you manipulate text for a living. And you do it sitting down.

Now, decision, decision is a different matter altogether.

Decision is hard.

Decision is hard. Decision is tough. You don’t have enough information. You don’t have enough time. You don’t know what’s going to happen. There are consequences. The consequences are real. Apple doesn’t make time machines.

But decision, too, is only emotionally hard. Again, it’s not like you’re lifting 90-pound roof slabs all day in the Utah summer heat. You’re not a coal miner. You’re not a janitor. You’re not oppressed; you’re not gay.

Which means that your life is easy and only your emotions are making it hard. Which means you’re being a drama queen, because you do no manual labor; you have no struggles; yet there you are creating struggles within yourself for entertainment. For drama. To make yourself look and feel important — look how important you are, with all them tough decisions you done be having to make, standing their like Atlas, the very weight of the world on your aching shoulders.

So decision is easy. It’s already physically easy, because everything in our lives is ¹. And it’ll be emotionally easy, too, as soon as stop having emotions about it.

Which SRS? Which book? Which kanji method? Where to start? What to start on?

‘The fark cares? It’s not like you’re disarming a bomb there, champ; this isn’t a Kathryn Bigelow movie. We sit around clicking mouses and eating candy and getting fat. This is modern life. And it’s easy. Some would say too easy, but those people are sick, twisted masochists — I happen to like things too easy .

So stop being such a queen and just pick whatever. Decide. Either way, it’s easy in that all action in your cushy, sedentary life is easy. It’s easy to do; it’s easy not to do, and — now that you’ve given up the duh-rama — it’s easy to pick as well.

Go on, timebox it. 90 seconds. Pick. Click. Move on with life.

Your life is easy. Stop the drama. Just sit back and enjoy being rich and privileged. What’s that you say? Not rich? You have a computer, an Internet connection and you can read the English language. Trust me: you’re rich. We are the elite of the world. Enjoy your clicking .

Are some of the worst.

There’s nothing worse than a good reason to learn a language.

Logic won’t move you.

Addiction will.

Stop looking for good reasons. They won’t help you. They will only oppress you. You don’t need them.

Go searching. Go shopping. Ask around. Go find, make or choose things that are addictive-but-helpful to you — addictive books, addictive movies, addictive people, addictive songs. Then you’ll (literally) be able to talk.

People with good reasons to learn Spanish and Chinese (“I ‘should'”; “there are a over a billion Chinese people”; “it will make me more marketable” ¹) are the least likely to actually learn them.

People who get hooked on telenovelas, on the other hand…