Learning how to make quick decisions is important for a multitude of reasons. If you need more time in your day, don't want to miss out on time-sensitive opportunities, or want to project a more confident demeanour, fast decisions are vital.

Decision making for Executive Assistants

Maybe more than most people, an EA's life is an inundation of decisions, and often on behalf of your Executive. From small to large, they arrive from every direction, and from everyone. This means you need to be efficient.

You can't waste time worrying over every question put in front of you. Learning how to make fast, well-thought-out decisions can put some extra time back in your hands, and save you stress with your Executive.

How to make quick decisions

If you take a little too much time  making important decisions, it is likely that you struggle with making small ones as well. The benefit of this is that you can practice making fast decisions in areas where the consequences are limited. Here are a few things to try to speed up your decision making process:

• Try setting time limits on yourself for everyday decisions.
• Know the requirements you have for a solution. Then, once you've found something that matches them, choose it. Don't waste extra time finding other options out there when you already have something that fulfils what you need.
• Figure out what matters. Decisions can come with a lot of information. However, when there are one or two main points that hold most of the weight, why spend time sorting through the rest?
• Prioritise decisions. If something will have minimal repercussions should you make the wrong choice, why are you spending time on it? Make a snap decision, and learn from it for next time.
• The more decisions you make, the more information you will have to pull on for the next one. This buildup helps make snap judgments easier in the future.

Why it is important to make quick decisions

As an EA you will be dealing with time-sensitive decisions a lot, and your Executive needs to be able to rely on you to make the right choices quickly, and to know what matters.

Making decisions with limited information can lead to being wrong roughly 25 per cent of the time, which can be scary. However, not making a decision means that you're wrong every time.

To help you make those tough calls, you need a wealth of knowledge and support behind you. To gain this and other skills you need, reach out to us here at Executive Assistant Network.