We often talk about quick decisions and how we need them in everyday life. But it's sad too, because quick decisions are the toughest skill that you could ever learn. You must know though that prompt decisions usually have an equally bad outcome unless lady luck is always lingering. A quick decision simply ignores all the circumstances, and instead of relying only on your gut instinct to direct you to your desired outcome, a quick decision most often blindly ignores the circumstances surrounding you.
In business, it's almost impossible to think strategically at all times. Thinking about how you will confront a problem or how you will make the next step in an important project might take weeks or months. You might even have the impulse to procrastinate and keep putting it off so you won't have to face the consequences. If you let yourself fall into this pit, you'll never reach your goals and will eventually end up miserable and even fired from your job. To help avoid all these problems, you must make sure that you're using the right kind of quick decision making process at all times.
A great example of this is a certain quick decision making process called intuition. Whenever people make decisions based on their gut feeling or on their intuition, they usually fail to achieve their goals because they didn't put their head into the game. If you're using quick decisions frequently, then you're simply avoiding the entire thought process that might result in your success. That's why experts advise people to rely more on their brain than their instincts.
However, even though your brain can be used for quick decisions and because you know it's best at that, you still need to practice making decisions with logic and objective facts in mind. Your brain isn't the best tool for all decision-making tasks. People who rely on their intuition are making decisions based on their intuition, which may be correct in some cases. However, they're often wrong when it comes to judging how those decisions will turn out in reality.
It's true that impulsive decisions are generally less stressful and they can be faster to execute than a more deliberate, careful process. But if you don't know what you're doing, you'll run into some major problems along the way. As mentioned above, there's a big difference between making decisions carefully and impulsive decisions. The former should be considered a conscious effort, while the latter are not. To make the best decision using logic, facts and objective information, you have to do your homework before you act impulsively.
Now, we all know that some impulsive decisions can be very beneficial in the long run. For example, if you know you have to get to work on time in order to keep your job, an impulsive decision to drive your car instead of walking the few blocks will probably help you do just that. But if you make quick decisions without careful research or a clear understanding of the consequences beforehand, they can be very detrimental. For example, if you take an impulsive decision to buy that new video game system with the best price just because you saw a great deal online, you might wind up wasting a lot of money on unnecessary accessories. While the great deal might not be that great in the long run, you could end up broke.
On the other hand, careful and calculated decisions based on objective, accurate information will most likely result in better results. And this is where the real problem lies: most of our decisions are made based on our instincts and emotions alone. These aren't really rational decisions. In fact, the only reason we make impulsive decisions in the first place is because we feel like we need to act that way, and that we can't wait until we make them so that we won't get caught by ourselves.
So in summary, we need to use our common sense, and not our instincts, when making decisions. If we feel like we need to act on something based on our instincts, it is usually an impulsive decision. But if we use some objective information to help us draw good conclusions based on the facts, we will most probably come to the right conclusions more slowly and logically. Therefore, good decisions quickly and properly based on reliable and accurate information is always the best course of action.