A “picopause” is a little loving nudge towards simplicity and serenity.
You know how it can be really tiring when you have to spend more time/energy than necessary on relatively unimportant decisions like where to go for dinner tonight?
I am listening to all of the This American Life podcast episodes from when it started back in 1995 and I found a neat idea for helping to navigate “difficult” decisions like that. It’s from Episode 289: Go Ask Your Father from May 2005. The relevant part of the story starts at around 43:04.
The idea is that one person will give their opinion on what to do, and then the other person will give their opinion, and if there is a disagreement, they will both rate their opinion as to how strongly they feel about it. So, if one person says they want steak and the other says chicken, but the steak person says they are a five on the steak and the other says they are a seven on the chicken, they go with the chicken.
I really like this idea because it allows a different element to show up in the conversation. Rather than having two equal people with two equally valid opinions, you get two equal people with two equally valid opinions, but maybe one of them cares more about the outcome than the other, so why not let them be the decider this time?
I want to try this out sometime this week…
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