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Hesitation and Procrastination: The Lethal Cost of Delay

There’s an old saying. He who hesitates is lost. She who hesitates is lost, too. There is no good thing that comes out of hesitation, postponement, delay. These are habits that erode your capacity to be present and to make decisions and take responsibility for them.

You don’t need more time most of the time. You do not need to tell yourself you’ve got to mull something and sit on it. If it feels like a good decision, here’s what research shows. You are better off taking action and deciding now.

They did an experiment that was as follows. They brought in people, and they gave them a choice to make under two conditions. The first condition was they got six choices to choose from because people like, or so they presume, lots of opportunities to choose.

They like many choices. They don’t want to be forced and coerced to choose just between a couple of things, and everybody kind of agrees there’s a general idea that they ought to have time to think it over and mull it and not make some quick decision.

So they brought people in, and they gave them six choices, and they gave them a full week to decide. Then they brought in another group of people, and they told them, look, you get two choices, and you’ve got to decide now what you want.

Then what they did was do a follow-up with both groups, and they had a measure of finding out how much they enjoyed the choice they made. To a percent, the people who had to decide then and there and had to decide between just two choices liked their decision. They were much more satisfied with it.

The people who had six choices and five days or a week to decide, they more or less hated their decision. It’s like the process of weighing that many things sort of wore them down because it kind of gets complicated, and also they were looking into the bad side of everything.

Don’t get caught in delaying and hesitating on things that you know you can do. All you’re doing is giving yourself grief, and you’re delaying and postponing, which is a bad habit. If there’s an action to take, take it.

People who are successful are quick responders and early adopters. They decide now, and they go for it. They hear it. They know it. And they act. You need to practice that. You need to practice those things that successful people do because it’s going to give you a leg up on all of this hesitation, delay, and postponement.

This is why stuff accumulates around you and bears in on you, and why you’re behind because you think you need time to do things you don’t need any time for at all. In fact, you’re going to subtract from the effect. So get this right. Start making decisions in the moment and on the fly, and sure.