GetvPro

Intro

First of all, today’s topic is based on accepting that there is such thing as “free will”

Sorry Robert Sapolsky, I’m not seduced by your proposition that “free will doesn’t exist” , yet 😉

If you’re not familiar with Robert’s work, his take on “free will” is that we are “running on rails” ; decisions we make don’t come from conscious choice, rather from outside influences—our biology, our social and physical environment and other elements beyond our control. Thus, rendering the concept of free will obsolete! 🧠🤯 I’m stubborn and proud, so I’m not ready to accept that I did the dishes before I wrote this paragraph because I didn’t want to wake up to them tomorrow

On the other extreme, is the idea that we are faced with making 35,000 decisions each day, most of which occur autonomously. This idea floated around a while back, but the science behind isn’t super solid

My take ; we are somewhere in-between ; the idea of us having “zero free will” may come from using a heuristic / sub-conscious decision making method. However, I do believe when we aren’t in auto-pilot, we regularly make well considered decisions.

For instance, what made you want to read this article today? The title? Other articles you’ve read by me that you’ve enjoyed? Did you choose to read it right away or did you add it to your list of tabs or a use a “read it later” app like pocket to review another time?

How it started

Many books have been written on “better decision making”, I’ve read only two

1 – Thinking fast, and thinking slow by Daniel Kahneman

2 – Micro motives and macro behaviors by Thomas C Shelling

That being said, my own decision making method ™️ pre-dates anything I gleaned from the above 2 books. My parents have gifted me with a number of good traits: being media savvy, music, and considered decision making!

Around 1998, when I was 18 years old, my dad created an excel spreadsheet to build us a new family computer when we had moved from Canada to Ireland. PC parts were very expensive to buy in Ireland against what we were used to in Canada. At the time, Intel had just released the Intel Celeron processer. My dad had learned that you could over-clock these CPUs beyond their normal clock speed when paired with a motherboard that had a BIOS that supported over-clocking, at that time, ABIT! Remember them? The excel spreadsheet that had various columns for the computer components , and had rows for the regular Intel Pentium, as well as the Celeron, he used a simple formula to show the price difference between the two, and showed me how excel helped to guide the decision making process to get the most “bang for the buck”. It worked! He built a great PC which we used for our entire trip in Ireland, on return to Canada, we swapped over to the 220v PSU for a 120v unit, and were good to go. From this point onward in my life, I began using excel sheets that included simple methods for tallying points to extend beyond the normal “pros and cons” method that is still commonly in use

Check out the text on this bing AI image creation, some funny hallucinations 😂

I’ve found the considered decision making process very useful over the past 26 years. Especially when I need to remove or recognize my personal bias the decision making process

The process

Whenever I need to make considered decision, I start with a template saved within my MS OneNote which I call the “decision making chopping block”. The template looks like this

Prior to using OneNote, I was doing everything in excel, which can be over-kill for minor decisions, so, as you can see from the date on the above screenshot, I switched to OneNote in early 2019. I do still use XLS for some items

I’ve got two categories for decisions:

minor: So purchases that are within 100$ to $500 cost
major: Purchases above 500$, jobs, places to live, cars, lifestyle changes

Depending on the category, I’ll add additional columns. Here’s a recent example that guided me on long-overdue monitor upgrade (see the following related blog post)

In this example, you can see I didn’t actually assign any “points” to the list of 4 monitors that made my short-list. Instead, after putting all the relevant details into the columns: cost / size / PPI, I ended up adding a ⭐next to the Dell monitor, then waited for a sale.

For both categories, it’s important to track the time you’ve spent so far on the decision making process. I didn’t have this at first, but there was an iPhone to Android phone swap that I debated for 6+ months a few years back, which is way too long when debating rectangles 😉

Let’s go over some “fun” examples, at least, they were fun for me 🙂

1 – Places to live

This is about as major as it gets, choosing to leave your home town for somewhere else. I’ve done it 3 times, the first move was kind of made by my parents, moving from Winnipeg, Manitoba to Balbriggan, Ireland in 1998, then back to Winnipeg in 2002. The third decision I made around 2013 when I took up my first Citrix WFH related job with Royal Bank of Canada. I asked to be re-located to my favorite Canadian city of Montreal, despite not knowing French. This decision I did in my head based on some simple criteria: lower crime, no need for a car based on a superior public transportation system, better job opportunities for my wife at the time, more places to visit inside in the city, “cool factor” 😎, similar rent , cost of living costs

Fast forward to 2019, I was offered a job in Nashville, Tennessee via a TN1 work-permit. For those who don’t know, the TN1 is the work permit associated to the NAFTA program shared between Canada , the united states and Mexico. I was not able to follow through on this job offer at the time, but it did plant the seed for a possible move to the states. As such, my greatest decision making chopping block was born!

Here’s a sample which I stopped updating in 2023 after my trip to Texas

Texas / Arizona came up with the highest points, I had already visited Arizona in May 2021, so took off to visit Austin / Dallas in July 2023, around the time of my 44th b-day. I enjoyed my time in Texas, but it didn’t have the “sexy” factor I was looking for. So what happened? The spreadsheet system failed? Not exactly, there a qualities of any place you visit that are not easy to define from a far. You need to put your boots on the ground

2 – Cars

I moved to Montreal in 2015 based on using the very good public transport system we’ve got. I sold my 2001 Acura 1.7 EL car, and didn’t look back, until 2021. One year into covid-19, I got bored being cooped up with the ridiculous rounds of lockdowns here in Montreal, and was missing driving, so , me and my friend Wayne went out on a few test drives. Soon after, I signed up for communuauto, and went WILD with test drives, completing 29 individual test drives. TBH, this was NOT my most efficient decision making effort. Why did I do SO many test drives? I missed driving, torque and high HP is fun, I was not fully up to date with recent standards in cars: Backup cameras, AWD, lane keep assist, radar cruise, touch screens, etc. It took me a long time to re-define what I wanted in a car. At the start of my car buying quest, I was focused on price and reliability, as i’d only owned low horse power cars in the past, the thrill of driving a fast car was new for me. Like a lot of things I like, I called the experience of driving a car that felt fast “SEXY”

I mostly understood the difference / relationship between torque and HP, but what I didn’t understand until I’d reached the end of my test drives, was how the weight of the car against it’s HP impacted the driving experience. My final test drive was a BMW 3 series x28i. This 4 door sedan has a curb weight of 3600 lbs, but only 240 HP. So, in when driving it, it felt under-powered against the Lexus IS 350 F Sport that I had also driven that summer. After my under-whelming test drive of the BMW 328i, I went home and added a new thrust, I came up with a simple formula to explain it. Divide the weight of the car by the HP to get what I called the “thrust to weight ratio”. I went back to the top 5 cars I’ve driven from the full list of 29. Sure enough, the ones I had written “SEXY” in my excel sheet all had a similar “thrust to weight ratio” between 11 and 12. I refocused my car search , and purchased a 5-speed 2011 Subaru WRX (related blog post) in August of 2022. After some time, I realized the manual transmission life was no longer for me, so traded in the WRX for a 2017 Lexus IS 350 F Sport in January 2023 (related blog post)

The experience of doing all the test drives was great, however, I could have cut it down to 5-10 test drives, if I’d be following the calculated method I only discovered towards the end of my initial set of test drives. A sample of some of the top dogs is shown below

3 – Jobs

Salary, job expectations, title, location, work-life balance are easy enough to assign points to, but what about leaving your current set of trusted co-workers and starting over again with a new work family? How do you prepare for this? Would you ask to be interviewed in person so you can meet your prospective new co-workers in person at the office? Try to find them on LinkedIn? I actually don’t really know the answer to this question, from 2017 onwards, only one of the jobs I’ve had I knew ONE person (just one) at the new job

So, the experience of leaving one known environment for an unknown one, is similar to being the new kid on the 1st day of school at a new school. SCARY! For me, I’ve assigned a great number of points to taking up a job where there are people I know, vs “new kid on 1st day of class” scenario

A few years back, I had 2 competing job offers, the tie breaker , was related to the above, choosing to work somewhere where I didn’t known anyone, or choosing another employer where I had previous work experience with a few folks. I asked the employer where I didn’t know anyone about the possibility to visit the office, to meet the people I was working with (this was pandemic era, where everyone was spooked to meet in person), they denied the request, so I accepted the offer from the other employer. I was able to apply a simple points system for the other key elements, and the final “column” in the spreadsheet came down to the “human factor”, which was harder to quantify

4 – Health

Microsoft OneNote is used as the starting point for collection of data to apply points. Applying my method to health decisions isn’t quite as straight forward, however, the data collection, journaling pre-reqs are applicable. An example, until January of this year, I was tracking annoying nature related allergy symptoms. After I had to cut short a trip to Florida due to allergy issues, I decided to take action. On engaging a health care professional, I was able to go back to a dedicated section of my OneNote related to allergy issues, to give the nurse all the info they needed to write me a prescription. I presented all the data I’d collected on what had worked and what hadn’t worked to help deal with my allergy issues over the years. This helped the health care professional make their own informed decision on what to prescribe me. I’m now “cured”. Again, no “points” were used, but part of the system was useful in resolving an annoying condition I’d be dealing with for 10+ years

5 – Voting

Canadian elections don’t have as long a lead-up us the US ones, and certainly aren’t as interesting. We’ve got 5 federal parties we can vote for, with 2 of them having won general elections. I follow politics, but don’t vote for the same party every 4 years, or whenever a by-election is called, as is common. Instead, I like to review the campaign info for each party, and will sometimes watch the debates, the process doesn’t take me very long, but until 2021, I had never applied my points decision making process to where to direct my vote.

For the last election in Sept of 2021, I wasn’t going to be home in Quebec to vote in person, so had to do mail in my vote. I took sometime to apply my points system to help guide my voting choice. I figured I would share my results once they were tallied, but I wanted to keep those conversations light hearted and fun and toxic politic conversations were so pervasive at the time in Canada/United states/beyond, so the “baseline” “candidate” was my beloved dog – who turned 13 years young on Thursday April 4, 2024 💓

I created some columns that I cared about, tallied the points for my dog as the leader of the “Golden force” party some of which were:

1: Climate change: Small carbon footprint based on being a DOG (+1)
2: Foreign policy: No squirrels allowed in back yard
3: Health care: Supports doggie health care
4: Housing crisis: Supports multi-zoned property and proper urban density planning ; for instance, a couch you can sit on, or sleep under
5: Covid response: Covid proof, no dog in the fight

I applied the points to the actual big 4 parties I’d actually vote for (removing the Quebec separatist party) and came up with an interesting result! Voting conservative for the first time ever. It surprised a lot of my friends, but when I explained my method, they fully understood

The limits of the system / wrap-up

Dating! I’ve been single since November 2019, and twice have applied a points system to potential dates, it’s been a disaster both times. I believe this relates to what I’d mentioned in the previous section on ‘jobs’, where the human factor is harder to measure against more simple qualities. Knowing if someone is the right life partner is complex or simple, but I’ve not had success applying my calculated method here

While writing this piece, I realized that the greatest benefit of my “system” might just be the benefit of time. The act of filling out rows and columns in a spreadsheet or info into OneNote is manual and tedious, thus removing an impulse buy scenario. An example, I was recently looking into a new phone plan with Canadian provider Rogers. I wanted to get a plan that had more data as well as one that didn’t stick me with $12 CDN per day roaming charges for my various trips to the states, as part of the call to Rogers, I inquired about contract phone options. Most of ya’ll will be aware, flagship phones from Samsung / Apple have been WILD for the past 4 or 5 years. Rogers gave me the option to “lease” an iPhone 15 Pro max for $27 CDN per month, with a “buy out” option after 2 years for $900. Once i’d collected the details from the Rogers rep on the phone, of course, they wanted me to pull the trigger right there and then, I asked to sleep on it, with a call back in 3 days from the same Rogers Canada sales/service rep.

2 days later, I remembered that I had $300 USD in my Amazon US account from a gift card. I reviewed the specs of the iPhone 13 Pro Max (released 2021) vs the iPhone 15 Pro max via GSMAreana

I watched some YouTube videos, and bought the phone on Amazon US to be shipped to my parents in Florida, which i’ll retrieve when I see them on their way back to Canada in Alabama. I took the call from the same Rogers rep on Friday, requested to move my services to them, but with my own phone. My total monthly costs from my existing Fido Canada subscription were now just $10 more, but i’d get 75 GB of data, and free roaming in the states. Here, the decision was made by delaying the initial offer

What are some decisions where you’ve tried to apply a drawn-out decision making process? Leave your answers in the comments, or send me a DM on X

The method described might not be for everyone, I do admire those who make considered decisions in their head or “trust their gut”, for me, it’s served me well

have a nice day and thanks for reading 😎

Owen