“There’s a reason leaders are followed: they make decisions.”

Throughout my life, I have found the single largest contributor to inefficiency to be indecision. Take, for example, walking across your home to get something. Say you go to the kitchen for a pair of scissors to open a box that arrived in the mail. Walking towards the kitchen you stop midway and think to yourself, “oh wait, I could just use my keys in the bedroom or maybe the box cutter in the garage would be better” and head towards the garage. Then you think, “no, the scissors are better because then I can open the other mail too” and you head back to the kitchen.

Does that situation sound familiar to you? Maybe you do this when deciding which gas station to go to, or which restaurant to eat in, or which email to respond to. Consider what happens when that small, indecisive moment becomes your typical way of making decisions. A small, repeated amount of indecision adds up to a tremendous amount of lost time. Worse, this repetition of second-guessing allows insecurity to infect your self-confidence, leadership and ability to achieve goals. Indecisions are killing your productivity.

Thinking through a given situation, the variety of options and outcomes, and analyzing which path to pursue, is part of our DNA. It is this very ability that has helped our society move out of caves and into homes. Without this ingrained need to look for better solutions we wouldn’t even have running water. Harnessing the power of analysis for the sake of innovation is great, but moving forward also requires that we stop analyzing and make a decision. To improve your productivity, you need to turn off your indecision.

Turning off indecision is simple and talked about often. It’s called “listening to your gut”. Your first instinct, whether to give the correct answer to a test question or to choose a course of action to pursue, is most often the optimal answer or path. The moment you analyze it is when the indecision begins and your productivity breaks down.

Either don’t go into “analyze” mode, or at least don’t let the analysis stop your activity. Keep walking to the kitchen to get the scissors and focus on following through with your decision, even if you continue to think about getting the keys and box cutters. By the time you’re done thinking about it all, you’ll probably be done opening the box with the scissors and lost no time at all.

Indecision is also a form of insecurity (or lack of confidence) about a particular decision. Insecurity is a lack of self-validation. Thus, indecision can start when you fail to acknowledge your abilities or validate your decisions. In simpler terms, indecision may simply stem from not allowing your gut instinct to be right because you’re not giving yourself the freedom to listen to it. Your analysis is getting in the way.

Let your gut instinct play out and see if it’s right a few times before you tell it to go away with your thoughts and analysis. When you see that it is right more times than not, then you’ll gain the confidence to trust your first answer and move faster. Productivity will naturally increase over time as you continue building up confidence. You’ll also be validating yourself in the process and removing insecurity at the same time.

There’s a reason leaders are followed: they make decisions. Making a decision isn’t the hard part. It’s sticking with that decision and moving forward quickly that’s hard. And if you think it’s hard to decide which blouse to wear today, or which task to work on first, or what to make for breakfast, then you’re going to find making big decisions even harder. Do or don’t do something, but start making decisions faster if you want to improve your life.