Time is money, its a saying we all grew up listening to over and over again, realising the value behind it only once we all started working and noticed we’d grown up. Time management is a skill needed to excel at life. What takes up time though? Work, daily chores like eating, hobbies like working out or drawing? If you look at the bigger picture, you are the only one taking up your time, and you’re doing this by making choices or decisions.

At the end of the day how your time is spent, is based on the decisions made by you. Now you’d probably end up achieving very little if you started counting the number of decisions you make every single day. This is because our day is filled with choices, our mind however has limited energy or willpower to deal with making good mindful decisions daily. So how do you make sure you’re making good decisions? Well, you can start by identifying routine decisions that you spend a lot of time on frequently and identify them as distractions, these can then be automated. Another way would be by organising your day at least roughly and automating the decisions that you can.

4 Tips to automate decision making

• Set a routine: Make a routine, compartmentalise your day and use applications to automate these routines, so you don’t spend any time worrying about the smaller decisions of your day.For example, you can integrate Google Calendar with your Evernote to send you reminders to help you stay on track with your routine.
• Automate your electronics: We spend our days behind screens. Automating these screens can help you stay more focused, and save you the time of deciding how much time you need to dedicate to certain tasks. Set screen times, automate all your gadgets and applications to go off to sleep. Get push notifications to remind yourself to use work related applications when needed.
• Automate cyclic tasks: There are certain events that keep repeating themselves. Buying groceries for instance, or sending follow up mails, or making payments. We still spend a lot of time deciding when to do these things, repeat the decision making process of when to schedule these tasks, and what to order. With automation you can get these out of your way for good. Clear payments periodically, create a generic list of items you receive regularly and automate getting reminders for when they need to be reordered.
• Let apps help you decide: Weigh the pros and cons of making decisions quicker by using applications that allow you to weigh all sides of an argument. There are plenty of applications in the market that give you data on your conflict and help you make a calculated and unbiased decision quickly.

Automating technology can help you get rid of a lot of tasks that require decision making, allowing you to have more time on hand for the tougher choices. You can check out our API integration platform, Quickwork to get started with building your own automated journeys. Let technology take over the routine decisions and focus on more important choices like getting in touch with us to know more about automation and how you can use it in your daily life to make better and quicker decisions.