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The 5 D’s That Can Make Or Break Your Decision Making Journey

By Darren Finkelstein
By Darren Finkelstein

The Accountability Guy®

Home » Accountability » The 5 D’s That Can Make Or Break Your Decision Making Journey
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While working in an organization, it’s essential to hold yourself and your team accountable. More importantly, you need to do what you say you will do and get your team to do it too. Your decision to do things in the organization and set priorities according to your tasks achieves 45% of your goals.

You might be wondering how to make decisions to prioritize your tasks effectively, isn’t it? Fret not; this blog will tell you about 5 D’s to help you make a breakthrough in your decision-making process. It will help you achieve your goals successfully and ensure you hold yourself and your team accountable always.

So, read on to know the 5 D’s and how to use them to make effective decisions for the success of your organization.

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What Are The 5 D's?

The 5 D’s are essentially actions that you can revert to when you are stuck in making decisions.

When you decide to do something and create a plan, you need to prioritize your actions. While prioritizing, you can use Eisenhower’s Matrix to analyze what’s important and urgent, important and not urgent, urgent and not important, and not urgent or important.

Accordingly, you can decide what you need to accomplish to achieve your goals successfully. According to Eisenhower’s matrix, deciding what you need to accomplish is what the 5 D’s help identify.

 The 5 D’s are as follows:

  • Do – urgent and important things
  • Delegate – urgent and unimportant things
  • Delay – important and not urgent things
  • Delete- unimportant and not urgent thing
  • Decide to call an accountability partner – to hold you to your decisions

These 5 D’s are instrumental in the decision-making process.

How Do They Help?

Now you know the 5 D’s, let’s explore them in detail and understand how they can help you make effective decisions in the organization.

Do

Once you’ve decided that something is urgent and important to achieve your organizational vision and mission, you need to get into doing it.

To do something, you need to ensure 100% commitment and be invested in your goal. Ensuring this is important to ensure you aren’t doing things half-heartedly to merely get things done within the deadline.

Get that single task done wholeheartedly and fully invest in getting it done well and timely. You may think that you’ll achieve more if you multi-task and get several things done all at once. However, you’ll find that you aren’t all-in on any task, and you will fail to achieve the goal you want to attain timely.

Delegate

Whatever you find urgent and unimportant, it might be a good idea to delegate those tasks. These are tasks you might not be able to devote time to personally. However, they need to get done timely. So, you need to get somebody to the tasks.

You need to find someone efficient, capable, and invested in the organizational goals to complete the tasks.

While delegating, it’s crucial you set the expectations correctly and explain the task in as much detail as possible. You’ll avoid double work and ensure your job gets done well and timely.

Ensure you don’t confuse delegating with running away. It is as important as getting things done. It ensures you don’t have the sole burden of a particular task.

Delay

You’ll want to delay some important and not urgent tasks at times. This enables you to devote more time to the task at hand.

Further, if you lack the competence to achieve a certain task, currently, delaying is a good idea. It gives you time to collect the data required and gain the skills and competence required.

However, ensure you don’t confuse delaying with procrastination. Procrastination is when you intentionally delay something and could hinder your business. So, only delay the tasks that are difficult to accomplish currently or need more time to ensure the highest quality.

Delete

The unimportant and not urgent tasks do not have any business being on your priority list. You need to delete such tasks as they will merely hinder your business.

Know what you can accomplish timely and in good quality to ensure you don’t have unnecessary tasks on your to-do list.

Decide To Call An Accountability Partner

You might want to decide to call your accountability partner to ensure you have someone to do a priority check for you. They will tell you if you have got it right. Further, they will be on you to ensure you get things done effectively and quickly.

Wrapping Up

So, use the 5 D’s to get things done in your organization. They will help you make decisions easily and ensure you prioritize the tasks that are necessary for the success of your organization. You need to learn what to do, delay, delegate and delete. Plus, you must call your accountability partner or coach like TickThoseBoxes to keep you on your toes.

When you follow the 5 D’s, your decision-making process becomes more manageable, seamless, and actionable. You’ll know exactly what you need to do to achieve your organizational goals. So, read this blog and know about the 5 D’s to get things done.