Can't decide? It's probably some third other thing

You might walk up to your boss and give them the solution you think they need. They’ve already gone over it with you; here’s the task, it should do this, etc.

And then they say, “Oh, but I meant do it like this. Is that a quick change?”

They never mentioned that when you discussed it with them. It might have felt like a waste of time, but that’s okay. Your boss isn’t as technical as you are at this, and it’s your job to figure things out.

It’s a big change. You rip out big chunks of the old code and start from almost-scratch. “I think this makes a bit more sense,” you say to yourself.

“Uh, hmm… What if you just make the button bigger and put it there? Make it pop, so the user knows where to click,” your boss says.

You know that you shouldn’t add another neon green button labeled “Send email” right next to the already existing “Send” button. It looks worse. But more importantly, it’s more confusing.

This is the critical moment when the right way to do things is in direct conflict with what you’re told to do. It’s the part where you say to yourself, “The boss just doesn’t get it.” You think you’re not explaining it well. You spend more time thinking about how to explain it than doing the actual work. You feel like you shouldn’t budge. It’s very important to you to do it right because how you work reflects how you live.

This is the moment where you need to realize that the solution is in some third other thing.

A lot of things in life are presented to us as a dichotomy. Left or right. Go to the gym or stay at home. Beef and noodles or chicken and rice. Change your life forever, or don’t.

Our brains like having fewer choices, or else we get decision fatigue. It makes it easier to rationalize why we should choose one over the other. But it also makes it very hard to decide when there is no clear winner. It’s easy to become paralyzed with indecision.

Be creative! Life gives us dichotomies, but we already know that life is messy and uncertain. Don’t forget that you can do messy and uncertain things to life too!

You don’t have to choose between just two things. Turn around. Go for a walk. Ask for a fruit and a red wine. Change your life the way you want.

The third other thing isn’t always immediately clear. You need to look at your options and ask yourself, “What if we just did neither?” When you start to think this way, a lot more doors open up. In fact, it feels more like already-open doors revealing themselves to you. Oftentimes, you’ll arrive at a solution that’s 10× better.

I completely changed the user interface by adding an intermediate step where the user can preview the message before sending the email. Now, it’s perfectly clear that the user needs to view the contact information first, preview and edit the message, and then finally send it out. “Oh hey, that’s way better,” my boss says.

If you find yourself torn between two choices, trust that you can always find that third other thing. ✻