Most of My Big Decisions Were Made by Deferring Them

Last winter I listed every decision from the previous six years that had materially changed my circumstances. Eleven items: two job changes, a move, a relationship ending, a course I did not take, and so on. Then I tried to identify, for each, the moment I decided. In seven of the eleven, there was no such moment.

What happened instead was a period of considering, during which the situation resolved itself. The job offer expired. The flat went to someone else. The course started without me. The relationship ended when the other person decided. In each case I experienced the outcome as something I had chosen, and in retrospect what I had done was hold a position long enough that the alternatives were removed.

This is not necessarily bad and I want to resist the framing that it is. Deferral is a real strategy and sometimes the correct one, particularly when information is arriving. Two of the seven, I think, went well precisely because I waited.

The problem is that I did not know I was doing it. A deliberate decision to wait is different from a failure to decide, and they feel identical from inside — both are experienced as “still thinking about it.” The difference only shows up in whether you have named what you are waiting for.

That is the change I made and it is small. When I notice I am not deciding something, I write one sentence: what would have to happen for this to be clear. Sometimes there is an answer — I am waiting for a number, a conversation, a month of evidence — and then I am genuinely waiting and can put a date on it. Often there is no answer, and the honest version is that I am not waiting for anything, I am avoiding, and the deadline will decide.

In the eighteen months since I started doing this, the effect has not been that I decide faster. It is that the deferrals are now visible as deferrals, and about a third of the time writing the sentence makes the answer obvious enough that I just decide there and then. Not because the sentence is insightful, but because “I am not waiting for anything” is uncomfortable to write and easier to resolve than to keep looking at.

The other thing I noticed going through the eleven is that the four genuine decisions — the ones with a moment — all had a person in them. Someone asked me directly, or I had to tell someone, and the conversation forced a position. None of the four resolved through thinking. This matches something I have seen in interviews for years and had never applied to myself: people decide out loud far more often than they decide alone, and the function of the other person is not advice, it is that you cannot defer while they are waiting for you to finish the sentence.

So my second change was cruder. For anything I have deferred twice, I tell someone what I am going to do, before I am sure. It works, it is uncomfortable, and I have no better mechanism.