When it comes down to crunch time, what will you do? How will you make a decision, and what will you base your judgement on? Its make-or-break time – what will you do, and more importantly, how will you do it?

Have you ever been framed into a moment when you had to make a decision and it was a really tough one too? You spent long time thinking about it and it drained you out?

Well next time, try spending the time, by looking at the advantages and disadvantages and follow the following ten life savers that will ultimately lead you to making the right decision.

Beware of over- reliance on instinct
Gut feelings suggest we know the right choice to make. Instinct is usually best used, though, when you have plenty of facts and information. Some decisions are ‘counter intuitive.’

Write it Down
Since many decisions involve juggling with lots of facts and feelings, making sense of them in your head can be difficult, if not impossible. Writing down the information in some systematic way, such as the pros and cons, may improve your handling of some choices.

Stress Warps Judgement
Strong feelings or potentially serious consequences can seriously distort decision-making. Find ways to reduce stress through, for example, talking about the choice with someone else, allowing more time for deliberation or adopting relaxation methods such as breathing deeply several times to calm you at the point of decision.

Clarify Time Scale
Many choices do not require an immediate decision. You frequently have time to allow more information to be accumulated before deciding. It is not being decisive to rush into a choice when more reflection or information might produce a better result.

Simple statistics improve some choices
We rarely know the full consequences of a decision. So most choices are based on our guess about the probabilities – the chance of something occurring. The human desire to make sense of things and see patterns where perhaps none exist can lead one astray. Simple statistical methods can aid many decisions.

Use your brain
It helps to sleep on a difficult decision before arriving at your final choice. Your brain is like a computer, able to sift complex facts and judgements without your conscious state interfering. You will often wake up they next day, clear about what to do.

Employ available information
Look for information that might contradict your point of view. Refusal to seek evidence might show one is wrong is a common cause of poor decisions. If choice has cost you a great deal of time and money, it can be very tempting to stick with it, even though the evidence suggests this is a wrong decision.

The past is a poor indicator
We cannot know the future, which, by definition, has not yet happened. It is therefore tempting to rely on the past to tell us what the future holds. Because something has happened even many times before does not necessarily mean it will automatically occur again.

Keep money in perspective
Reducing all decisions to a question of money is misguided, even if you are an accountant or treasury official. Many choices involve consequences that are not readily or appropriately reduced to money terms.

MAKE IT YOUR CHOICE!
A group may become so committed to a choice that it unconsciously combines to reject that anything contradicts what it wants to do. Similarly, an authority figure can sometimes influence decisions inappropriately, when more objective reasoning would suggest a different choice. Make sure when you make a choice that it is yours and not someone else’s.