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Tripwires, heuristics and satisficing can all streamline your decision-making processes at work, if you know how to use them to your advantage. Google ‘How many decisions does the average adult make each day’? (or allow us to do it for you) and you might be surprised by the result. Article after article quotes 35,000 decisions as the standard. Cornell University research suggests 226.7 of those decisions are solely based around food (this checks out for me). This 35,000 figure would factor in sleeping time and equate to roughly 1500 decisions per hour, which sounds excessive, says Associate Professor Guillermo Campitelli, Psychology Lead at Murdoch University. This statistic is most likely factoring in our automatic responses, he says, like moving our legs as we’re walking or scratching our head, so perhaps it’s not indicative of the average human’s daily mental load. However, there is no denying that we face a mountain of decisions in our professional and personal lives every day. So learning how to strengthen our decision-making capabilities can only be a good thing. Here are some research-backed ways to do that. Use tripwires to streamline decision-making You may have heard the story of Van Halen’s David Lee Roth requesting
