3 Mistakes to avoid when making important decisions

Whether you are thinking about buying a new apartment or car, getting a new job, wondering what to study or what candidate to hire for your business, these tips can help you make more rational decisions with greater long-term satisfaction and less regret.

ThinkCool is an app to help you make better decisions.

First, don’t act on impulse

According to the Nobel Economics Prize-winning research described in the book Thinking, Fast and Slow your mind has two different systems for making decisions: a fast-thinking, intuitive, impulsive, emotional system, and a slow-thinking, analytical, logical, deliberative system.

Emotional marketing and bias appeal to the fast-thinking system and the first step when faced with an important decision is to resist making the decision only based on your first impression and intuition. How you feel about something is important, but you also want to give your slow-thinking mind a chance to evaluate the decision and provide a cool-headed perspective.

Don't let others decide what's important

Marketers and salespeople, but also your own unconscious bias, can lead you to make decisions in their favor by selling you their preconceived notion of what should be important for the decision.

This is why it is good idea to think about what should really matter for your decision before you start to evaluate alternatives. This can both help you avoid following marketing-led messages but also make you appreciate unexpected alternatives that do not agree with your initial emotional impression but have real advantages for the things you care about.

Don't get overwhelmed

Complex decisions often have a lot of different aspects to evaluate and balance, and it’s difficult to keep them all in your head.

By only making your choice when you have all the important data for all the alternatives you are considering in front of you to compare, you can avoid forgetting important aspects or making a gut-decision because your memory and reasoning can't keep track of it all.

ThinkCool helps you avoid making these mistakes by providing a better decision process that lets you evaluate alternatives with nuanced factors that go beyond simple lists of pros and cons.