Artificial Cheese

When I started working in a team environment I realized that every decision a person makes has a cascading or rippling effect on the people around them, especially when the decision has to do with scheduling.  Since then I have been very mindful of people’s schedules and have made sure that they have been mindful of mine…even if it is empty.

That realization led to a personal revolt- its been about a year now since I began to take stand against indecisiveness.  I made the decision because I noticed that people around me, professionally and otherwise, had a tendency to delay making decisions and sit in a state of limbo until they’re put in a circumstance where a decision is made for them.  The result in technical terms is deadlock and starvation, where one person’s scheduling decisions are held up by another person’s inability to commit in a timely manner.

In the beginning, the initiative that I took was a wild success.  Everyone who asked me a question got an answer, and I lived up to that answer at all costs.  The costs, it turned out, were surprisingly less drastic than I predicted.  Daily life becomes much smoother when you don’t have a conditional schedule.

As months passed I took the notion far beyond scheduling; every decision that I made had to be made final as quickly as possible.  Even this ended up being a refreshing new perspective on making decisions that would otherwise linger.  By the final few months I was pushing my new religion to others, pointing out when they passively provided an inconclusive answer and forced them to make a decision.  For some it was a welcomed suggestion, but others didn’t respond so well.  I disregarded those who opposed as ’set in their ways’, and inable to come down on themselves when they do something wrong.

Since then I’ve been hit with a dose of reality.  I realized that I haven’t made a real decision in over a year.   When the time came to put my ideology to the test, I was conviced by the same circumstance over which I seemingly assumed control that I took my practice too far.  While I can safely say that every day indecisiveness is usually not warranted, the complete opposite is not true.

I’ve come to this conclusion before, and it seems to be fairly predictable.  Whenever you find yourself rebelling against one behavior by pledging yourself to the complete opposite, remember that the answer is always found somewhere in the middle.