From Micro to Macro: Which Decisions Deserve Your Time?
If I asked you how many decisions you think you make in a day, what would your answer be?
Ten? One hundred?
It is often said that we make around 35,000 decisions a day. The exact number is difficult to pin down and depends a lot on what counts as a decision, but the idea behind it still holds.
When you start thinking about it, it is not that surprising, especially once you notice how many of these decisions are tiny, almost invisible ones sitting alongside a handful of much bigger ones.
Which side of the bed you get out of, which route you take to work, whether to check your phone after hearing a notification, the words you choose in an email, the list is endless.
Most of these decisions happen almost without us noticing.
The micro decisions
What I find interesting is that not all decisions influence our lives in the same way.
Some have very little impact individually, but become significant through repetition.
Picking up our phone is probably one of the best examples.
On its own, it barely matters. But repeated dozens or even hundreds of times over weeks and months, it does shape where our attention goes, how much time we spend focused, and sometimes even how we feel.
In that sense, many of the smallest decisions become powerful because they accumulate, hence the power of habits, which is brillantly described for instance in Atomic Habits by James Clear.
The macro decisions
Then there is another category. The decisions that genuinely change the direction of our lives.
It can be changing career, moving country, starting a relationship, leaving one, beginning a degree, starting a business.
What has always surprised me is that these decisions do not always receive the amount of thought we might expect.
I often think back to when I applied for my first role as an energy analyst in Oxford. At the time, it simply felt like an interesting opportunity, and I sent the application without giving it much thought.
Looking back now, it is remarkable how much that single decision shaped everything that followed. It led me to move abroad, begin a career in energy consulting, build friendships, discover coaching, and ultimately shaped much of my adult life.
With hindsight, I sometimes think I spent more time choosing my wording in a single email than I spent deciding whether to apply for that job.
I suspect many of us have similar stories.
The decision we forget we are making
There is another decision that is even easier to overlook. The decision to keep doing what we are already doing.
We often think of decisions as moments where we actively choose between two options. But staying where we are is also a decision.
Every month we postpone reflecting on our career. Every year we tell ourselves we will think about it later. Every opportunity we don't explore.
We are still making a choice, even if it does not feel like one.
It reminds me of the Eisenhower Matrix, where the most important work often sits in the quadrant that is important but not urgent.
Because they are rarely urgent, they can remain untouched for years.
Bringing it together
Perhaps the question is not how many decisions we make each day, or even whether they are micro or macro.
Perhaps it is whether the amount of time we give a decision is proportional to the impact it could have on our lives.
Sometimes we can spend an hour choosing something we will forget next week and that will have zero impact in our life. At the same time, we can postpone for months a conversation or a decision that could shape the next ten years.
If there is a decision you have been postponing into the future because it never feels urgent enough, it might be worth giving it a little more space. It may turn out to be far more important than today's inbox.
If you are not sure where to start, or which decision deserves that space, feel free to reach out. Sometimes just talking it through is enough to see it more clearly.
Thank you for reading, and as always, I would be curious to hear your thoughts.
Gauthier