Sari Swears Podcast: My Favorite Decision-Making Tools

Have you ever caught yourself thinking:

“Why does everything feel so overwhelming lately?”

It might not be your caseload.

It might not be your schedule.

It might be this: You’re making thousands of decisions every single day.

Big ones. Small ones. Constant ones.

And it’s draining you.

In this week’s episode, I break down the exact tools I use to cut through decision fatigue, so you can STOP spinning and START moving.

Here’s a quick look:

Why “just thinking about it” keeps you stuck (and what actually works instead)
How to create a personal litmus test so decisions become automatic
The simple shift that instantly reduces overwhelm (hint: zoom out)

Because the goal isn’t to make more decisions.

It’s to make fewer and better ones.

If you’ve been feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or mentally tapped out… this one’s for you.

Love,
Sari

P.S. If you’re stuck between options right now, don’t overthink it, grab the free decision-making download and work through it step-by-step: sariswears.com/decisions

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“The average person makes like 35,000 decisions a day… and for trial attorneys, you’re making more high-stakes decisions than most people. All of these decisions lead to overwhelm.”
sari de la motte

Transcription

Sari de la Motte:

I have found that if I just sit and think about something, I will get stuck eternally in mental loops, but if I'm actually journaling on it, it accesses a different part of my brain and a different part of my inner wisdom and I end up coming up with some of the best stuff. But I consistently ask questions, so I'll come up with an answer and then I'll say, "But what about this?" And then I'll write an answer to that and I'll say, "Well, then how does that connect with this?" And by the time I'm done journaling, I have figured out a big portion of my problem. You're listening to Sari Swears on the Sari Swears Podcast.

Well, welcome to another episode of Sorry Swears. So glad for us to be together again. I'm just going to quickly say if you've not subscribed to the podcast, please do that because it is helping us get the word out. Our podcast is already pretty damn popular, but we've had a 44% increase in listeners as of late, my marketing team tells me, which is very exciting. So subscribe, subscribe. It's working. And thanks again for being here. So today I'm talking about my favorite decision making tools of all time because I'm here to ask if any of y'all have been overwhelmed with decision making? Yeah, I thought you might. And I think this is true for all of us, but particularly for trial attorneys, the average person makes like 35,000 decisions. You heard that right. 35,000 decisions a day. And that can range from what to where, what to eat, all the way to major high-stakes decisions, which I think for trial attorneys, you are making more major high stakes decisions on the daily than most average people.

And so I think the overwhelm is quite there with trial attorneys, and that's why I wanted to do today's session on this episode. All of these decisions lead to overwhelm. So what I'm wanting to talk about today is some tools for both types of decisions, the high-stakes decisions and kind of the lower stakes decisions, but that also takes up a lot of our bandwidth because I've got some great tools for you there as well.

So let's start with our high-stake decision-making tools. So my number one, and I have four in each, I know it's not an odd number, but that's how it ended up, my number one high-stakes decision-making tool, number one, is journaling. I write all of the things all of the time. If I have an issue with anything, I am writing it down. I'm telling you, I almost cannot think without writing it down. And if any of you have done my time management course, Life by Design, you know that I also use Post-its and a paper calendar when I'm doing my big picture thinking, and I'm going to talk about meta view in just a minute, but if I'm figuring something out, I'm writing it down. Now that could be a couple different things. It could be plotting it out here on my iPad because I have the Apple Pencil and just looking at all my different choices. It could be actually writing my thoughts down.

What I like to do when I'm journaling is I ask myself questions. So I'll start, because a lot of you are like, "I don't know how to journal." You can start by just saying, "This is what's happening and I don't know what to do about it." And then ask yourself a question. "Should I do X or should I be thinking more about Y?" And then kind of write your answer out. See what happens. I have found that if I just sit and think about something, I will get stuck eternally in mental loops, but if I'm actually journaling on it, it accesses a different part of my brain and a different part of my inner wisdom and I end up coming up with some of the best stuff. But I consistently ask questions. So I'll come up with an answer and then I'll say, "But what about this?" And then I'll write an answer to that and I'll say, "But then how does that connect with this?" And by the time I'm done journaling, I have figured out a big portion of my problem.

So journaling is huge, at least for me. If you've never tried it, I would suggest that you do. Again, there's different types of journaling. I don't mean the type where you're just sitting and talking about what happened today, although you can do that too. But in terms of decision making, I find that handwriting, maybe you can do it typing, but I think handwriting is the piece that actually, and there's research that supports this, accesses that part of the brain that's going to get to some wisdom that may not be available to you in any other way. So I would highly suggest that you attempt journaling and bring it in as one of your decision making tools.

All right. My second high-stakes decision-making tool, and you can also use journaling for low stakes, but it really works with the high stakes kind of thing, is that meta view that I was just talking about. So often, one of the reasons we're so overwhelmed with our decisions is we are trapped in the minutia. We're just making decisions based on what's right in front of us at the time. And oftentimes when I'll do this with clients in our sessions, pulling out and getting the meta view is what is needed. So this is why, for example, when I do my planning, I do it a year in advance. Now, does everything happen exactly how I plan? Oh, of course not. But I'm always looking at the big picture view. What is it? Where do I want to go on vacation? What times? How do I want my schedule to look? When will I be in the office? When will I not be in the office? It's a meta view.

Once I've got my year planned out, then I do quarters. So just a few days ago, I did my Q2 planning where I looked at all the things I had planned in my big meta view and rearranged them based on what kind of life looks like now. And then at the beginning of every month, I look at my month view. I also have meta views in terms of a 10-year plan. We have a 10-year plan here at Sari DLM, where we want to be in 10 years, what that looks like. We have a 10-year plan at home. What are we doing in 10 years? What does our finances look like? So, oftentimes when you are struggling with decisions, it's because you're so locked in the minutia instead of actually pulling out.

I was working with a client the other day and he said, "I keep talking to my wife that we just need to like... I work for myself. I mean, we just need to take a day here and there and go do something or have a family meeting where we talk about upcoming things, but we never seem to do it." That's because you are locked in the minutia of the day to day. When you pull out and you're looking at even one-month planning, you can be like, "We're going to take that Thursday and go do that thing." But when you're just in it all the time, you feel like you never have any time, you're just doing what's in front of you. So a huge part of reducing your overwhelm at decision making is to make decisions ahead of time. And when you make decisions ahead of time, you're doing it with a meta view, meaning you are pulling back the first year, first 10 years.

So we have a 10 year, a three year, and a one-year plan here at Sari DLM that's based on the EOS system. So 10 years, what are you doing in three years? What are you doing in a year? Then looking at your quarter, your month, and then your week, and then your day. Most of my decisions are made in terms of schedule, for sure, a year in advance. Most of them are. And what I'm doing on the regular then is just adjusting. If something comes up, if this didn't get done, I'm adjusting. But I've made most of my major scheduling decisions a year in advance. I'm telling you everything that I'm sharing with you today, so much of this is going to be about making decisions ahead of time. That's where we want to be so that we don't have the overwhelm and we're stuck in the minutiae of everyday life.

Okay. My third high-level or high-stakes decision-making tool that I use is instead of using pros and cons, first of all, let's talk about why pros and cons don't work, is because it doesn't take into consideration when you write, "Here's all the pros of all decision, here's all the cons of the decision," It doesn't take in consideration the weight of the pros and cons. For example, you may have one pro and 15 cons, but that one pro is more important than the 15 cons. It doesn't take into consideration the weight of the factors that you are weighing. And just notice how we say weighing, that's saying that things have different weights, but pros and cons lists don't take that into consideration.

Now, I wish that I remembered who taught me this, and it's going to be much easier to see it visually than it is for me to talk about it. So go to the show notes if you want to look at what this actually looks like in terms of decision making. In fact, we're going to have a free download for you. If you go to sariswears.com/decisions, you can download that, but it's called... I don't even know what it's called. I call it a ranking system. And so here is basically what it is. So you're going to take all of the factors in a decision.

So let's say you're looking for a new home. So before you go and you start looking at all the houses that your realtor has put together for you, the ones that you found on Zillow, you're going to put all of the factors down that you want in a home that are important to you. So let's say you want to make sure it has a fireplace, that it has a deck, a swimming pool would be nice, let's say depending on where you live, it has to have air conditioning, a big kitchen, a certain number of bedrooms, so on and so forth. So you have eight factors in this home of things that you would like for it to have. So what you're going to do then is on the left-hand side of a piece of paper, here we are writing things down again, you're going to write them down in a list form. And then to the left of each thing, you're going to number them in this way, or letter them in this way, A, B, C, D, E, F, G. Let's say those many things, A, B, C, D, E, F, G.

Yeah, those are seven things, or I said eight, but let's say you have seven. All right. Now what you're going to do is you're going to compare A to B. So let's say that A is a fireplace and B is a huge kitchen. So you're going to ask yourself, or if you're doing it with your spouse, Kevin and I have used this so many times in different areas, is a fireplace somewhat more important, important, or very important compared to the kitchen, or is the kitchen? So we would look at both of those and we'd say, "Well, big kitchen is more important than a fireplace." And then I'd say, "Well, how much more important?" And Kevin would say, "Very important, like the top." So what we would do is we'd go down to the bottom of the sheet and we'd write B3, because B was the second one. It was a big kitchen. And how much more important is it than a fireplace? It's very, it's the top. So A gets a three, B3.

Great. Then we go back up to the top and we now compare fireplace, which was A, to pool, let's say, which is C. And we ask the same question, which one's more important? If we had to choose, which one's more important, the fireplace or pool? And maybe we'd say the pool, I think the pool, but we're kind of split on it, we could go either way, so we're just going to say it's somewhat more important. Great. So at the bottom of our piece of paper, we write C1, pool wins, but by just a little bit. All right, then we're going to go back to the top. Fireplace compared to whatever number four is and we'll do the same thing. Fireplace compared to whatever five is. Fireplace compared to six until you've gone through all of them.

Then you go back up to the top and you've already done the fireplace. Now you're going to do a big kitchen. So big kitchen compared to pool. Big kitchen compared to the next thing on the list. Big kitchen. And you do it until you get to the last two and you just compare that to that and now they're all compared. Then you go down and you count them up. How many things did A get? So you count up all the A's and then little numbers next to it. So if it's an A1 over here and an A2 over there, that would be three for A. And then you see an A, three over here, so now we are at six for A, and it ranks them in terms of importance. And you'll see, you'll say, "Oh, that is not funny. A big kitchen is our number one thing. And right after that is pool and right after that is this. Or these two ties." So we want to make sure whatever house we get, these are the two things that it must have.

But what this ranking system does, and again, hopefully the written will be more clear than me talking through it, is it shows you the weight of all the things, because otherwise you could go look at one house that has a big kitchen and a pool, and then you look at the other house that has a fireplace and four bedrooms, and you'll be like, "Well, we want all of those things, so which one?" But once you've done the ranking system, it tells you what the most important factors are. And so whatever house has the top three of your ranks or top four, you get to decide that's the right house even if the other house has some of the other things you wish it had, but now you know which ones are the real important ones.

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Sari de la Motte:

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So I give you that tool because that really helps Kevin and I when there's so many factors to take some time and rank the factors, weigh them, and then look back at our decision and go, "Well, looking at this now, we obviously should get this house because it has our top three things that we love." Tell you what's most important.

Number four in terms of our high-stakes decision making is, and something I also always teach my clients is the litmus test. So a litmus test is something you can use. For example, I use this with my clients a lot to determine what types of cases that they want to take. Here at work, I have a litmus test in terms of speaking engagements because people ask me to speak all the time and I can't possibly say yes to all of them. And so I go through a ranking system. I wouldn't say a ranking system, a litmus test. So the first thing on my litmus test is, is this my audience? So what do I mean by that? It has to be plaintiff trial attorneys. Any other audience, unless it's something like Oprah has asked me to come speak or something like that, I'm not going to spend my time speaking for that group because you guys are my people. So is it plaintiff attorneys? If it clears that bar, then the next bar is, is it 150-plus in the audience?

Again, I'm not saying I will never speak to other audiences, but in general, you have to clear that bar. It's got to be a big enough audience to warrant me traveling to go speak. Three is, does it fit my schedule? So are they asking me to speak at a time where I have other things scheduled already and would take mountains to move my schedule around to make this work? If so, then it's a no. Even if it clears the other two bars. But if it's something that I could easily put in my schedule, then it's cleared that bar. And then the last bar is, does the money make sense? Sometimes I don't get paid for speaking engagements, which is lame, but it's my people with a big, huge audience, and it's easy to do in my schedule and I never go anywhere where they don't pay for me to get there. And they're going to pay for me to get there. Okay, money makes sense. So that's my litmus test.

And where a litmus test really helps is that, again, we get so drowning in minutiae. I can hand this litmus test over to my team. They can do it before I even hear about the speaking engagement. And then they can come to me and say, "It doesn't pass your litmus test. I'm running it by you in case there's something special about these people, but otherwise I'm going to say no." And it cuts down on my having to make the decision. Oftentimes with you, you love to help people and I get it and there are more people to help than there are trial attorneys around. And so you'll get stuck in, "But I really like the client, but it's not quite the..." Create a litmus test. Look, it has to be seven figure plus for me to take it, otherwise it goes to an associate. I've got to love the client. It's got to have all these other facts. I don't know.

But creating a litmus test, again, helps you make decisions in the moment so you're not spinning. It's like you've got this thing and it's served you well over time. My litmus test with speaking engagements has never steered me wrong. It's always made the decision easy. So create a litmus test. Put on there the factors that must pass for you to be able to say yes. You may have exceptions, but in general, these are the things for me to take a client, or these are the things for me to go to trial. I don't know. You can create litmus tests for all kinds of things.

All right, let's talk about the four things that help you get out of decision paralysis, meaning having too many decisions. These ones we just talked about are helping you make decisions that are kind of big weighty decisions, but decision paralysis when you have too many decisions to make will also affect your high-stakes decision making, so I want to give you some tools that I use here so that I cut down on all of the minutiae so I don't have that many decisions to make in that realm of my life, so it leaves brain space for the high stakes decisions. So the first one is routine. Routines are everything in my world. I always say routines are my remedy. Whenever I'm feeling off, I'm like, "Am I not on my routine?" And the answer is almost always yes. Because routines, how they take away from decision making is instead of going, "Should I work out today? Or what should I eat for breakfast today?" Which are decision making and they are draining your brain, a routine answers the question.

I don't even think about it. I work out every morning at 6:00 AM. I'm on one of my machines. That's just my routine. I don't have to think about it. Should I do that today? That's just what I do. That is the routine. I don't have to think about what I eat for breakfast. Why? Because I have oatmeal for breakfast every single morning. The stone, whatever, oats that aren't as good as the other ones, by the way, but Kevin does them the night before. They sit, he warms them up, brings them to me. I don't have to sit there and be like, "What should I have for breakfast today?" I know what I'm having for breakfast. Cut out that decision. What time should I go to bed? I always go to bed at the same time. I always do the same routine at night. We do the same routine with our kid at night.

These are ways I cut down on decisions by having routines in place. I have a Saturday routine where I do my weekly planning and I update my budget and I do a yoga class. And then that afternoon, I'm either working on household projects or spending time with my family. All of that, again, is that meta view that I've already planned ahead of time, but it's a routine. I don't have to be like, "What do I want to do today? When am I going to update the budget? I should find time on my schedule." No, it's always Saturday morning. Routine cut out the scheduling mayhem.

Number two, closely related, but not totally, is schedules. So a schedule's a little different than a routine. So a routine is something that you're repeating all of the time where a schedule is something that you are doing kind of like we talked about in advance. So I am plugging in where my vacation time is a year in advance. I am plugging in when I see clients a month or a quarter, it's really a quarter, actually even a year, in advance. I'm not trying to figure out when I will see clients the week before. My assistant needs to have my schedule way ahead of time. So I'm like, "These days and these times." That's not a routine because that's not always the same, but it's decided ahead of time. So many of you are just trying to find time on your schedule for whatever.

And when I'm working with my masterminds, for example, we spend a lot of time going, "No, no, no. You are going to have time, for example, to meet with people in your firm. They don't get you to just come up and knock on your door anytime they need something from you, because if you're like me, that's going to pull you off your game. You're going to have a time where you have Tuesdays and Thursday mornings door-open policy. If you need anything, come and find me then. You're going to have time when you're going to be doing your creative time in your schedule. You're going to have time when you're going to be doing your deep work. You're going to have time when you're going to do your depositions."

Now, a lot of that is dependent on other people's schedules, but in general, you can try to say, "I tend to do depositions on Fridays or Mondays." And it gives you a little bit more control. And you don't have to always be looking, "Where can I fit that in?" It's like, "This is where I normally do those. I don't see clients on Mondays or Fridays. I only do it Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Mondays and Fridays are my time for business development. On Mondays, meeting with my staff, my leadership team, meeting with my integrator. Fridays are catch up time and getting things done that I didn't get done during the week. I only see clients Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday." So it's not a decision I have to make. It's already been made. I know what my schedule is way in advance.

Number three, checklists. I have checklists for absolutely everything. When I pack, whether it's personal or business, I have a checklist. I have it down to a science of how I make sure that I have everything that I need to make. There's less decision making. I have a checklist for my evening routine. I have checklists for my kid to make sure that they've done everything, so I don't have to hold that all in my head. We have checklists here at work, that things are being done six weeks before, four weeks before, two weeks before, one day before for all of our events, we run on checklists. Why are you keeping all that shit in your head? Especially those of you who are like, "I have to do it because nobody else can do it right." We have checklists for everything and everybody has their own checklist. I don't have to have all that in my brain anymore.

It's all out on a checklist and everybody knows what they're responsible for. Checklists for everything ahead of time so that I don't have to be thinking, "Well, what are we going to do here? How are we going to handle that?" It's decided weeks, if not months, ahead of time. When I'm packing, I can hand that checklist to the person that works for me at my house and go, "Pack these items, get these already." I don't have to make that decision ahead of time. And fourth, systems. So these all sound very similar, routines, schedules, checklist systems, but they're all a little different.

Systems. So these are kind of outside things that I use to help me in my life. So apps basically. So for example, we just got the Skylight calendar. Maybe you've seen that on Facebook, but it's got the whole family schedule. It's nice and big. And it's got, I put all the things that I need my household manager to do. Every day is a little different and she can go in there and she can just tap them and say when they're done. It's got our menu on there, so we know what we're having for dinner. It's my kids' chores and every time she clicks off a chore that she's done, she gets a little reward or points, and four points equals a dollar in allowance. So I don't have to be like tracking that. At the end of the week, she can redeem them and it'll say how much money she gets and I pay out her allowance. That makes things easier in our house.

So there's a way that we've taken a checklist and made it electronic. I have this clothing app called Stylebook. It was free, I think, or very cheap. And what it does is I can take pictures of all my clothes and then I can put together little outfits because if you're like me and you have the type of ADHD that I have, I can stand in my closet for like 15 minutes in the morning and be like, "What should I wear today?" This way, there's little outfits in there that I put together. It's kind of fun to do. And I'm speaking to the ladies now because men don't have this problem. Well, maybe some do. David here is a fabulous dresser, so maybe he also has this problem.

But I can now look and I can just say, "This is what I'm wearing." I can do it the week before when I do my weekly planning. "Here's what I'm doing." So the day comes, I look at Tuesday's calendar and it shows me what I've already planned to wear. Again, making decisions in advance. It's keeping my brain nice and fluid so I'm not getting stuck in decision paralysis. It's called Stylebook.

Plan to Eat is another system that we use. It's like $40 a year and you can go in there and you can either put in a link to an online recipe or you can type in your recipe. It's really cool. And it will create a grocery list for you from all the ingredients. So you pull them into a calendar and you say, "This is what we're going to eat Monday through Friday." We plan every single meal. We plan what we're going to eat out and we plan what we're going to eat at home. And you pull it in and it says, "Here's your grocery list." And then we give that over to our household manager and she goes and does the grocery shopping. It's amazing. We do all that ahead of time, but we have things like Plan to Eat to help us systemize so we don't have tons of decisions we're making all the time.

And finally, Quicken, which I'm not super happy with because I just found out that it only will work on one computer. I can't share it with other people, so we're going to have to find a workaround for that. But for my personal budgeting, it pulls all my transactions. I can create budgets there. I can assign tags to things so I can pull up a report at any time to see how much I'm spending on X, Y, Z. I used to do all of that by hand in Excel. Quicken is awesome. We can figure out the workaround for multiple people using it for personal finance. And there's more, but those are the top four systems that I use.

The point is in today's episode is that the more that you can have routines, schedules, checklist systems, and yes, they take time to put together, the less decision paralysis you will have. And then when you do have those high-stake decisions that you need to make, you will have the brain space to make them by pulling out and having meta view, journaling and asking yourself those questions, having your litmus test, using the ranking system that I played with, and that you will become over time a better and better decision maker.

I don't know who it was. It was Warren Buffett or somebody, one of those guys that makes millions and billions of dollars. And when they asked him why, he said, "I make decisions quickly. I don't just stir and stir. I just, I move." And so this will allow you to move. Think of Steve Jobs. He didn't wear a black turtleneck every day because he's a weirdo, I mean, he's a weirdo, was a weirdo, but it's because he didn't want to have to make decisions about what to wear. He wanted all of his brain space to be dedicated to innovation. So these are the things that have helped me. I hope they helped you and we'll talk next week.

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