Nobody Is Paying You to Pick the Font

Hey there -

Do you ever overthink something minor, so much that you waste several of your "good hours" on something that didn't matter in the end?

I'd so love to tell you I've never done that, but… I'd be lying.

The amount of time I've spent worrying about things like the font size on a client gift, the exact color I want to use on my website, or the perfect word in something I'm publishing is embarrassing.

There's an academic phrase for this. It's called "an utter waste of f*cking time." 🙂

Sound familiar?

Most of us have some version of this. You rewrite the same email four times before you send it. You revisit a vendor option you've already decided on.

When I hold this mirror up to clients, they usually start to see the unwritten rules they've been following. Two common ones include:

• Failure is not an option. Every decision feels high-stakes, and mistakes aren't okay, right down to the font on a coffee mug. So you keep brainstorming and iterating.

• If you're stuck, just work harder. This feels productive. (It’s not.) More research, more editing, more asking others for input. It looks like you're being thorough and diligent. You're probably a bottleneck, and finding diminishing returns on your time investment.

These rules (and others) likely served you well at some point, and they may even have helped get you where you are today. They may also be the reason you're wasting your most productive hours on lower-value work.

There are costs to doing this.

• Every time you revisit a decision, everyone who's waiting on you pays for it, and it usually holds up three or four other decisions behind it.

• When your team sees you repeatedly agonize over small things, they start to wonder how you'll handle the more important decisions. They also see you model analysis paralysis and may assume that's how you expect things to be done.

• You exhaust yourself. Truly. 

Here are a few ways to break the habit:

• When you notice yourself spinning, ask what you're afraid will happen if you get it wrong. If the answer is "not much," you already know what to do.

• Decide in advance how much time to allocate to the decision based on its importance. Then stick to it. 

• Before you start deliberating, ask whether you could undo this decision next week. If you could, move on and save deliberation for decisions you can't take back.

• Ask yourself whose decision this is, and if it really belongs to someone else, give it back to them.

For my fellow introverts, I want to be clear: taking time to reflect isn't the same as overthinking. My own thinking often gets better after I've slept on it. Reflection moves you toward a decision, while overthinking keeps you going around in circles. It's helpful to know which place you’re in.

People pay you for judgment on the decisions that count, not for agonizing over a font. So the next time you catch yourself debating serif or sans serif, ask whether this is the best use of your time, and if it isn't, delegate it or delete it.

What decision have you been circling the drain on that needs to be finalized?

S

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