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Decisions, decisions, decisions (this is a triptych)


WordPress has utterly changed their writing UI. Apparently, they felt the need to reinvent text entry… (um… Why???)

I usually hold off on publishing a post until I’ve got the formatting tidied up and the images in. I can’t even figure out how to do that yet. So I’m posting a couple of ragged, really funny-looking articles, because it’s better than not posting at all, and there is SO much to keep up with I don’t want to keep falling behind here.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming…

As I’ve said before, making decisions amidst pain-brain and the neurowackiness of CRPS is not the easiest thing to do.

It takes more effort and time than it used to, but the years have led me to certain strategies that help me make good decisions pretty consistently, even though doing so is such an up-hill task.
[Sysiphus image]

1: Good info about the problem.
The idea of “good info” is key. For health and practical matters, I need my info to be coherent, consistent, reliable, and reasonable. Above all, I need it to reflect reality — in other words, to be true.

Opinions are not info, except when they are.

“Hey, thanks for that totally meaningless sentence, Isy! That’s not confusing at all!”

But seriously — a professional opinion, about something that’s pertinent, does matter. That opinion goes into the data pool.

Personal opinions, which are usually accompanied by logical fallacies[LINK], are not data (except to sociologists and comedians) and will never be useful to me. I can provide my own, if I want them. I’ve got loads of opinions, but they go up on the shelf when I’m culling information.

I need facts, data, professional (or highly-skilled amateur) quality input.

At this point, I’m not always as diligent about that as I think I should be. A large part of this early stage of inquiry is getting a sense of the social and cultural clues. I find it almost impossible to immerse myself in a subject without letting in some of the noise around it. /shrug/ Not perfect yet.

1a: Enough good info

After mulling things for a bit, I find that the lower-quality info annoys me instead of pulling me in, and I seek out more higher-quality info with a better basis in experience or science or whatever the best measure of the field is.

I’m building a mental map of the field, and where I see blank spaces, I try to fill them in with information.

  1. Good information about my options.
    This is where it gets interesting. Because of my significant non-standard needs, which are not so much a matter of taste as of survival (key point there!), I have to put extra time, diligence, and effort into developing a good list of options, because by the time I’ve done a reality check to evaluate my options against my diseases and disabilities, the REAL options available to ME tend to be few — even where most people would have a lot to choose from.

This is one of those occasions where the limits I live with just hit me in the face, and I have to figure out how to deal with a reality most people can’t even wrap their heads around as anything other than a bizarre whimsy or a sign of questionable judgment.

That hurts.

Moving right along here…

  1. Time to digest it

[use nav. tree image to illustrate how I absorb info, so it can be used as needed in any context.]

Reality check #1 — floating trial balloons
This is when I can sound half-cocked, because the decisions are floating around in my brain in about 5 dimensions and don’t readily lend themselves to explanatory words. Action words, yes, but not explanatory ones. So,it sounds like I’m going off half-cocked, when what I’m doing is trying on a decision for size.

My focus is oriented towards implementing my current decision, and of course at the time I always think it’s the Real Plan. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t focus as hard and pay as close attention to what goes on when my decisions meet the outer reality.

At this point, I’ve got the basic decision made, and I’m roughing out how to make it happen.

Because I have a peculiar set of circumstances (in every possible respect, it seems), my decisions are rarely off-the-shelf solutions. Every solution is customized. They have to be, or I suffer, lose brains, and die horribly. Or, at least, things don’t go well. YMMV — my mileage varies all the time.

  1. Digest results and lessons learned
    Just what it says. This is a semi-conscious process that I can feel happening, but doesn’t lend itself well to description. It’s more of the tree-and-grass activity, adjusting and tuning my ideas and understanding all the way down and all the way across and all the way up the related chains of ideas. It takes a lot longer than it used to, but it does happen if I’m patient and let it be.

In time, what I don’t know becomes obvious to me, and what I need to unload just goes.

If, at this point, I’ve got a workable choice, I’m done. Time for the next task.

If not, time to re-assess and re-evaluate.

  1. Seek out more and better info
    At this point, I’m past online research alone; I need to talk to experts. This involves phone calls and meetings and interviews. The face-time may not be free. The mobility may not be easy. I may have to spend more time on the phone than my brain is, er, quite happy with.

This one-to-one contact is a super-effective way for me to get more info out of people than they’re aware that they’re sharing, so if I can afford it — physically and fiscally — I’ll do it.

Naturally, being me (and wanting to get the most out of everyone’s time), I prepare for these conversations. I want to make sure I:

  • Have the vocabulary. I’m not at all afraid to ask for corrections, but it’s essential to have a working vocabulary of the subject and the major professionals involved. An hour or four over a few days of web-reading usually provides enough context for me to get going with.
  • Can show an intelligent interest in them and the subject. They need to know I’m taking them seriously in order for them to take me seriously. An extra 15 minutes on their web site, learning about the people and history behind the industry or company, pays off hugely.
  • Have a clear, specific answer to the question, “What can I do for you?” I need to know what it will look like when I have the answers I’m looking for. That means I need to have a pretty good idea what my questions should be. This is rarely as easy as it sounds. All those orbiting words and ideas have to be beaten into some kind of shape so the question marks bursting out of my head have meaningful sentences in front of them.
  • Have note-taking or recording equipment appropriate to the format of the meeting and my physical and attentional abilities at the time. I need notes. As medical professionals get drilled into our heads, “If it isn’t documented, it didn’t happen.” Plus, I want to make sure I get the data right. The ideas I can process; it’s the facts and figures and new terms I need to preserve.
  • Correct contact info for those I want to talk with. (It’s the little things…)

Since the bulk of my online research has already happened, the online part of this “more and better info” search is largely backward-referring:

  • Reviewing the websites I found most helpful
  • Chasing down data or info that seemed less important then, but deserves attention now
  • Filling in holes I didn’t notice or didn’t care about before, but want to clear up now
  • Going through my Evernote directory, if it’s a subject that needs one, and making sure I have enough info in it that I could go back and reconstruct my reasoning just from my information pool.

The discussions and “interviews” with friends and trusted contacts are important (especially in relation to whether an option matches my needs) but much more casual. A significant exchange can happen in 15 seconds at the deli counter or between gossip and talk about the weather. I can “download” a huge amount of info in these brief, solid exchanges with people who know me well.

Therefore, after a certain (large) amount of data-gathering, thinking, and processing, it’s essential for me to do sanity-checks and get assessments from friends and contacts I trust in that context.

  1. Reality check #2 — feasible plan, with fallbacks
    This is where the adhesive meets the tacky surface. There’s a lot more weight and momentum behind a plan that falls into place after all that thinking and working and studying up and experimenting, and it shows.

At this point, I should know what a successful outcome involves, what the major pitfalls — both generally, and for me particularly — could be and how to avoid or mitigate them, and what the likeliest way to implement the decision successfully should be. I should also have a good idea what “yellow light” and “red light” signals to look for, and what to do if they happen. I should have a good idea what the first round of “gotchas” might be and what to do to avoid them or deal with them. (Later “gotchas” are less likely to be out of the blue, and can be figured out more easily.)

To think it used to be so easy, and lightning quick, before I got sick.

I remember wondering, almost a decade ago, how I could possibly make sound decisions when there was so much that was so uncertain in my mind. The time passed, I kept working on it, and the decisions involved in making a process for decisions evolved into something repeatable and reliable. Phew!

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