There are some decisions you don’t get to not make. That is, not making a decision is a decision in itself.
You don’t get to not decide what to do today. Time passes. Avoiding a decision about how to spend it just means you’ll spend it doing nothing of consequence.
If you make stuff, there are decisions about your work that you don’t get to not make. You don’t get to not decide how to do design. Design is inherent in creating a thing. If you make a thing, the thing has a design. If you don’t think about the design, it’s probably bad.
If you don’t make stuff, maybe you deal with people for a living, managing relationships, communication, etc. These, too, are things you don’t get to simply ignore. Relationships don’t go away when you stop thinking about them. Not giving thought to how well you’re communicating probably means you’re doing it badly. And simply not communicating is a communication in itself. (We wonder: Is something wrong? Was it something I said? Or is nothing important happening?)
So: There are these things that happen whether you give thought to them or not. You should always be thinking about them as much as possible, then, right? Well, no. You simply can’t always give as much time or thought to them as you might think is ideal. Even if you could, more effort isn’t necessarily better. Sometimes less design ends up better. Sometimes a relationship benefits from a break.
What you can do is be aware of these kinds of things. Remember the tradeoffs you make when you spend your energy elsewhere. And remember that not thinking about them doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
