Maybe the answer is “nothing.” If so, at least it’s a conscious choice. It’s a simple enough question, at first blush. In fact, it’s the question I use to make the most of my day. But there’s more to it.

The real question is, “What do you want to accomplish today? … given your available time, your available energy, your MUSTs/needs and/or wants?”

Do you lean towards analysis or do you lean towards action? When I first heard the metaphor, describers and doers, it resonated immediately. It suddenly connected a lot of dots. I thought of all the people I know that have a bias for analysis and I thought of all the people I know that have a bias for action.

My manager shared Colin Powell’s lessons in leadership with our team today. I had seen Powell’s leadership lessons before, but it was a great refresher and a perfect reminder that some leadership practices never go out of style. In fact, I would argue that Powell’s leadership lessons are actually timeless principles. The beauty is that you can take his core principles and adapt them to your own situation.

When your spider sense tingles, how do you know whether to trust it? Intuition is a wonderful thing and it can serve you well. It can also fail you. The key is to know when it helps you, and when it works against you. It’s taken me a while to connect some dots but now I have a much better sense of when my intuition is on, and when it is off. It comes down to whether I have relevant experience or patterns to draw from.

A friend shared a simple technique for improving decision making and helping prioritize. It’s 10-10-10, by Suzy Welch. You basically test your decisions against time frames to make better decisions. You can use it to improve decisions at work, life, business, love or anything really. By testing your decisions against different time frames, you expose your needs, fears, desires, and unconscious agendas. This can help you identify and live to your deepest goals and values.

You can improve your decision making by adding criteria and weight. The key is making the criteria explicit. This is effective for personal decision making, and it’s especially effective for group decision making. It works well for personal decision making because it forces you to get clarity on your own criteria. It works well for group decision making because you create a shared set of criteria. When people know what’s valued, it’s easier to understand and weigh in on the decisions.

I’d like to share some of the insights that others have shared with me over the years about choosing career paths. My favorite insights have always been guiding questions that help me choose my own adventure. In this post, I share the same questions that some of my mentors have given me that have helped me analyze potential jobs, think through career decisions, and pick my paths. What’s interesting about the questions is that not only can you use them to analyze potential opportunities, you can use them to analyze a job you already have. Sometimes the best job, is the one you already have, but you may need to reinvent yourself or your job.

You can make more effective decisions when you know what the key elements are. When you make important decisions, there’s a few key factors to keep in mind. For example, you should rationalize and understand the problem itself. You need to know the problem you’re solving. You should also set boundary conditions for the solution. Success is often a spectrum so you should set boundaries so that you don’t limit yourself to something that’s impractical or something that’s impossible.

You don’t need to get what you want to be happy. You can be just as happy if you don’t get what you want, as you can if you get what you want. It’s not just sour grapes. You can manufacture your own happiness. It’s synthetic happiness. Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, teaches us that synthetic happiness is just as real and enduring as real happiness. Dan also teaches us that our longings and worries are overblown because we have the capacity to create happiness within ourselves rather than depend on experiences.

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A fallacy is simply a false or mistaken idea.  If you can spot logical flaws, you can save yourself from bad information.  This includes defending yourself from politicians, sales people, diet books, doctors, and even your own kids.  In logical arguments, where logic matters, it’s important to avoid your own logical fallacies, as well as spot them in counter-arguments.  In rhetoric, your overall persuasion is more important than logic.  While logic plays a role, it’s also about emotion and character (see Character Trumps Emotion Trumps Logic.)   …

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Editor’s note: This is a guest post from author Michael Michalko.  Michael is one of the most highly acclaimed creativity experts in the world and author of the best sellers Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (2nd Edition), Thinkpak: A Brainstorming Card Deck, and Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius.

You may not know Richard Cohen. He is the author of Blindsided: Lifting a Life Above Illness: A Reluctant Memoir.  He lives a life defined by illness. He has M.S., is legally blind, has almost …

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If you know the type of problem you’re dealing with, you can handle it more effectively.  One of the best skills you can master in life is problem solving.  One of the keys to effective problem solving  is knowing what kind of problem you’re dealing with.  For example, is this a unique problem, a pattern of a problem, or an exception?  Knowing the type of problem helps you choose the most effective strategy.  In The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on …

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In my previous post, I wrote about Balancing Your Intuition and Reason, but what if you aren’t very intuitive?  Is there a way to develop your intuition?  What if you just want to improve?  Those are some of the questions I set out to answer.   In the book, Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (2nd Edition) , Michael Michalko provides exercises for improving your intuition.
Intuition Must Be Developed According to Michalko, you improve through practice:
You cannot …

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Do you listen to your intuition?  I’ve learned to trust my intuition more and to check it against facts.  Whenever I’m not confident of a solution, I ask myself, “What’s your gut say?”  Sometimes my mind says one thing, but my intuition says another.  That’s when I know I need to figure out what’s behind the disconnect.  
More often than not, my intuition has taken a fast path through the problem and knows what would work, even before I’ve worked through all …

What are four common ways of making decisions?  How do you choose the most effective decision making approach?  In Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High, Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler write about the four most common decision making methods and how to choose the most effective approach.
Key Take Aways Here’s my key take aways:

Don’t use command when you need consensus.  Don’t use command for important decisions that need buy in.  Consensus would be more appropriate.
Use consult to make …

To make more effective decisions, develop disagreement rather than consensus.  Disagreement provides alternatives and makes you think more deeply about the issue.  In fact, if you don’t have disagreement, you’re not ready to make a decision.  In The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management, Peter F. Drucker writes about encouraging disagreement rather than consensus to helps make more effective decisions.
Key Take AwaysHere’s my key take aways:

Don’t make a decision unless there’s disagreement.   Find the concerns.  Before you make a decision, first find …

How will you measure whether your decision will be effective?  To make the most effective decisions, you need to know what to measure. You also need to select among alternatives of measurement so that you can truly understand what’s at stake.  In  The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management , Peter F. Drucker writes about how you need to figure out the most appropriate and relevant measurements.
Key Take AwaysHere’s my key take aways:

Know what to measure.  To make the most effective decisions, …

How do you make more effective decisions?  Do you start with the facts?  To make effective decisions, you first start with opinions.  You gather facts based on what’s relevant.  You then test opinions against reality.   In The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management, Peter F. Drucker writes about making more effective decisions.
Key Take AwaysHere’s my key take aways:

Know that decisions are judgments
Start with opinions over facts
Know the criteria of what’s relevant
Test your opinions against reality

Decisions are JudgementsDrucker writes that a decision …

To make effective decisions, first figure out what would be the right thing to do.  That’s your starting point.  There’s a good chance you’ll have to compromise along the way, but first figure out what the right solution would be before you start trimming it down.  You can’t make the right compromises if you don’t first know what right is.  In The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management, Peter Drucker writes about starting with what’s right to avoid giving away what’s important …

There’s two different kinds of compromises in decision making.  One compromise results in a decision that gets you towards the solution.  The other compromise results in a decision that is worse than where you started from.  In The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management, Peter Drucker illustrates
Key Take AwaysHere’s my key take aways:

Half a loaf is better than no bread.
Half a baby is worse than none.

I think metaphors are great for illustrating points.  I think these metaphors are easy to relate …