There was a time, a while back, when I was traveling for business almost every single week. That meant packing for three or four days on the road at a time, having to figure out which suits and shirts and ties I was going to wear. And then having to choose the perfect pair of socks to match each outfit.

This may seem trivial, but I had about 30 different colors and varieties of dress socks in my drawer to choose from, each with different designs, patterns, stripes, and shapes. So every time I got to this dreaded stage of the packing process, I would get more and more bothered by what an annoying, useless, and royal time-waster this was.

Until one day, as I sat there staring deep down into the abyss of my sock drawer, I came to the realization that something had to change. So I made the potentially life-altering decision that I would switch to wearing nothing but solid black socks from then on. And, so, the very next day, I went down to Macy’s in Herald Square and bought 18 pairs of the exact same plain, black dress socks.

Guess how many of my clients ended up noticing? None. And yet, how much time, energy, and stress did I immediately eliminate by making this one simple change? Tons!

By now, you’ve probably figured out that this post – and the Black Sock Decision-Making principle – isn’t really about hosiery at all. It’s about stepping back and finding ways to simplify the complexity in our everyday lives, and exploring the possible ways to reduce – by even one – the dizzying number of decisions we need to make on a daily basis.

Think about it: How many decisions did you have to make today…before you even left for work this morning?

What time to wake up?

SIMPLIFYING COMPLEXITY

Now imagine how much easier and less stressful your morning would be if you could eliminate just one single decision (or more!) from this list, simply by reconsidering your options and then streamlining your decision-making process.

In one of my favorite TED Talks (and books), “The Paradox of Choice,” psychologist Barry Schwartz explains “why more is less,” and how having TOO MANY options is actually too much of a good thing.

And in the beautiful and amazing book, Presentation Zen, the brilliant Garr Reynolds encourages us to seek out ways to turn complexity into simplicity – in our communications and in our lives – by looking for ways to strip things down to the “essential.”

Yes, the ability, and the willingness, to see things with new eyes and to differentiate the “essential” from the “non-essential” requires both mindfulness and time. But it will end up saving time in the long run, helping us to focus, be more purposeful, make better decisions, become less stressed, and ultimately, change our lives for the better.

So keep in mind these three classic quotations:

• “Our lives are frittered away by detail; simplify, simplify.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
• “Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler.” ~ Albert Einstein
• “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” ~ Leonardo da Vinci

And remember that the more decisions in our lives that can be standardized, systematized, automated, and/or eliminated, to the point where we don’t even need to think about them anymore, the more we can free our time – and our minds – to focus on the things at work, and in life, that truly matter.

That, in a nutshell, is what the principle of “Black Sock Decision-Making” is all about:

Simplifying your life...one day – and one sock – at a time.