00:00:00 Thanks for joining me on episode 753 of the inspired stewardship podcast. I'm Paul sawn from Kara. I challenge you to discover your true identity and calling. So you can be empowered to live everyday to the fullest. One way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this inspired stewardship podcast with my friend, Scott Mader. I agree Celsius depending on where you live,
00:00:32 that either immediately made sense to you because you've got an embedded kind of connection to that. And you know what temperature that is, or if you're somewhere like in the U S where Fahrenheit is the temperature that we use, that didn't make sense to you, and you would have to use system two to process it and to make it conscious so that you could then get it into something that actually makes sense to you.
00:00:57 Welcome, and thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling in the inspired stewardship podcast. We'll learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact Worry In today's episode about impacting the world by stewarding your time.
00:01:29 I talk with you about why you likely feel that more information is the best way to make good decisions. Why recognizing that you can make a decision quickly or with very little information is powerful. And I also share how you can prevent it from becoming an issue for you as we talk about stewarding your time. Wouldn't it be great if you could support this podcast and do it without just taking too long,
00:01:55 it turns out you can't. All you have to do is use inspired stewardship.com/amazon. When you're ready to make a purchase via Amazon and a small commission will come back to support the show. Just that quick. If you enjoy the show, when you are ready to buy from Amazon, just use inspired stewardship.com/amazon information and data. It seems like in today's world,
00:02:22 we're inundated with information companies talk about using big data. We're all targeted in different ways by advertising, by marketing. If you run a small business, you're constantly looking for information on your customers and how to better improve your business and your products. If you're a person who's living your own life, you're probably interested in having more information about how to make decisions and about more information so that you can make the right decisions.
00:02:56 You know, one of the things I do as a coach is I help people get information, but the more important part is I help them then use that information to put things into action, to change their behavior, to change their actions, to do something different than they've been doing before so that they can get new results. You know, the truth is we often feel like the best way to make the best decision is to simply get more information,
00:03:29 to find out more data, to, to find out more answers. And the truth is they've done research on this and they've tried to figure out, you know, how much information is the right amount of information that you need before you can make a good decision. And the truth is even if you have a hundred percent of the information in front of you,
00:03:52 you're probably still not going to make always the best decision or the perfect decision. Instead, you're probably at best going to make a good decision. So why then do we constantly search out and try to have all of the information at our fingertips? And I think it's because we have this false belief that that's what allows us to get the right decision. But the problem is that that comes at a cost.
00:04:24 If you're constantly seeking more data and more information, you can number one, waste, huge amounts of time, getting that data, getting that information. And number two, you can waste huge amounts of money getting that information as well. And even more than that, you can get overwhelmed with the data that you do have and end up not doing anything with the data at all,
00:04:54 because the truth is the data, even the decision, isn't the important part. It's then taking another step and putting that into action. That is so important. And our brain has a natural tendency to want to come to decisions relatively quickly, but then we push back against it with this belief that we should know more before we make a decision. And what's interesting is these things are kind of out of alignment and,
00:05:29 and impart that frustration because they're out of alignment is one of the problems that happens. See the truth is your brain has different systems that we use for making decisions. And part of what we need to know is what system are we using when we make this particular decision? You know, if you ask somebody to do a math problem in their head, what 17 times 37,
00:05:54 that uses what we call system two, which is a slow, deliberate process. This is, if you want to do that in your head, you actually have to think it through. On the other hand, if I show you a picture of somebody's face, you probably can almost instinctively recognize the emotion and maybe even make some predictions about what's going to happen next based just on their facial image and what,
00:06:20 what expression they have on their face that's system. One system, one handles quick, easy decisions, sensory, and put relatively unimportant. Decision-making these sorts of things. If somebody throws a ball at you, you don't want to have this long drawn out conversation in your head about the trajectory of the ball. You just want to duck, and that's why system one exist.
00:06:47 But system two is the higher order thinking. It's, it's more deliberate. It's able to think in voices and pictures, it's, it's able to do calculations. If, for instance, I tell you 22 degrees Celsius, depending on where you live, that either immediately made sense to you because you've got an embedded kind of connection to that. And you know,
00:07:10 what temperature that is, or if you're somewhere like in the U S where Fahrenheit is the temperature that we use, that didn't make sense to you, and you would have to use system two to process it and to make it conscious so that you could then get it into something that actually makes sense to you. And the truth is when you recognize that system,
00:07:31 two is always going to think I need more data, but the real, more valuable questions to ask yourself and how you can recognize that making a decision quickly can be valuable, is making a decision quickly, can number one position you to make the decision before others, which puts you in front of people. It also can make the decision cheaper, faster,
00:07:58 and save you time and money as well. And you can recognize that for some decisions you can kind of think about how much information do I really need. How important is this decision asking the questions? What am I going to do with this decision becomes important because then you can begin to say, what data do I need? What information do I need to actually make a decision?
00:08:26 What do I need to know? Not what data is available, what data is out there, but actually what data is valuable to make the decision, because instead of accumulating more data and more information, you really want just the right information. And that right information is probably nowhere close to as much information as you think you can balance the risk that you are willing to take the risk of making the wrong decision with the potential pay off of the right decision to target.
00:09:04 How much information do you actually need to make a decision? And it's probably closer to 50 or 75% of what you actually instinctively think you need. So asking these questions, bouncing these ideas off of other people and targeting the information that you gather so that you can reduce risk, but not spend huge amounts of time and money making the decision is a valuable tool.
00:09:33 And it's how you can prevent this data overload from being a problem for you. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast, as a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you like this episode on the stewardship of time,
00:10:06 be sure to sign up for our stewardship of time tips series, by going to inspired stewardship.com/time or texting four four, two, two, two time tips, and that'll get you our best tips on stewarding your time until next time, invest your time, your talent and your treasures develop your influence and impact.