Monday morning shortly before eight at Frankfurt airport, Terminal 1: you have checked in and are now drinking a cup of coffee and using your iPhone to answer your e-mails. Twenty minutes later – you have managed to take care of at least part of your messages – you board your plane to New York, find your seat, stow away your carry-on luggage, and take out the dossier of 180 pages that one of your co-workers has prepared for you in the last few weeks. By the time you meet your business partner in Gramercy at 1:00 p.m. local time, you must have found and understood the essential facts and details. But naturally just reading the paper is not enough, because you find masses of ­references to other documents you have saved on your notebook. All in all, you have more than 700 pages to read. When you arrive at the appointment with your business partner, you have not worked through even half of the documents. Only one thing is sure: the two of you must reach a decision today.   

To sum up: You must extract the data relevant to you from the growing amount of available data and turn it into meaningful information in order to serve your purposes. Just between us, and you do not have to tell anyone else: haven’t you recently felt it was all too much on occasion? Or do you always have every­thing under full control while staying completely relaxed? If you answered “yes” to the latter question, you can stop reading right now, because this article has nothing to say to you. But if you feel pressured to make decisions from time to time or even ­frequently, if you are overwhelmed by a flood of data, then you might be able to learn something.   

You cannot not decide   

Perhaps you have been in a communication training workshop at some time and heard the sentence, “You cannot not communicate”, or even heard it straight from the man who first said it, Paul Watzlawick. Much like the situation in communication, there is no escape from having to make our daily decisions. No matter what you do, you make a decision. There is no place free of decisions. Even if you stay in bed so that you do not have to make any decisions in your job, that is in itself a decision with major consequences, depending on just how long you stay there. So even the decision not to make a decision, to postpone a decision, or to delegate one is a decision. You can also regard every  single perception, thinking, and action as a decision: it is a selection from a number of options which means excluding the options which are not chosen.