Make sure you’re confident about every decision you make for the coming year with these easy tips to beat decision fatigue.
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 40 seconds.
We make decisions all year round, from big decisions that can affect your bottom line, to smaller decisions to improve your day-to-day routine. We’re now at that time of the year where we need to prepare and plan ahead for 2019! You might not want to even think about what your business plans and goals are for the first quarter of January, probably because you're already suffering from decision fatigue. RescueTime defines decision fatigue as “the deterioration of the ability to make good decisions after a long session of decision making.”
This means that the more decisions you make, the worse your ability becomes to weigh all the options and risks to make an informed decision. Here are helpful ways for you to work around the end of year decision fatigue and make sure you enter 2019 with a good plan.
Make the most of your data
HubSpot allows you to have visibility and insight of what’s working, what’s not working, and what might work. All businesses collect data but not all use it strategically to plan for the next year or quarter. Using the data you have in context for your marketing calendar is important. It will help you prioritise what should be done when and why. Once that is done, you can compare the data you collected in the previous week, month, quarter or year, to assist you with your decisions. Having data in context is a great way to assist you with your decision fatigue.
Remain agile
As much as we advocate planning, it is vital to remain agile with your marketing plans, and to use the data you have to assist you with this. There are always surprises that no plan or calendar can predict. Mike Lieberman, Chief Revenue Scientist at Square 2 Marketing, says that you can get sucked into delivering tactics and lose focus on what’s important... the results. Plan your 2019 business year with an agile marketing mind.
Use an annual calendar
Sitting down in advance of the year starting and mapping out your annual events will greatly reduce those last minute “oh yes, “this” is happening this month” moment. It may not seem like a big deal, but by eliminating this tedious process monthly, you create more headspace to focus on the bigger, more important decisions which can be unexpected. We make sure we have a calendar for each of clients, already filled with conferences such as INBOUND, seasonal events, budget time, company anniversaries, and the financial year-end. This helps to curb decision fatigue so we focus on more important decisions for our business and client.
Get it down now - your memory is not as good as you think it is!
You’re going to be looking at your business retrospectively to make decisions for the year ahead. Whatever you think of, make sure you jot it down or you’ll run the risk feeling like you have to start from scratch at the beginning of the year. It can be difficult to type up a concrete plan in an Excel spreadsheet almost at the end of the year, so perhaps using a simple flow-chart or decision tree will make it easier to focus. Keep this document somewhere where you can easily access it through the year - it means that those ideas you have throughout the year are documented and you can analyse their importance when it comes to the planning at year end.
HubSpot’s decision tree is a flowchart-style chart to help you examine different actions you might take for any challenge you are faced with. Having this diagram as a visual element helps to add more possible courses of action and what the results of those decisions might be.
With these four tactics you now have a great start to your 2019 planning, but remember, these are just the four we have found helpful. There are many more, take some time to figure out what works best for you and use helpful resources to give you some assistance.
The best decision you can make right now for the year ahead is to download our 2019 Marketing Calendar.
