A life that is plagued with poor decisions is like a watch with dead batteries – the times are more awry than it needs to be.
If you are serious about improving the quality of your life, you need to be more conscious of one simple thing that everyone overlooks 90% of the time.
It’s Opportunity Costs.
So, what are Opportunity Costs? This is best explained with an example.
Suppose you have the option of choosing between vegetables and chocolate. If you opt for the chocolate, your opportunity cost is not just the vegetables, but the flat tummy and healthier body you’ve always wanted.
The same thing happens when you have to choose between scrolling mindlessly on Instagram and taking action on the online program you just purchased. As before, if you choose Instagram, your opportunity cost is not just the time you would have spent on the online course, but also the rewards the specialized knowledge could have brought you in the future.
As you can see, in spite of our best intentions, as humans, we find a way to not act in our best interests. As a result, the quality of our lives continues to plummet.
But it is not all tales of doom.
You can improve the quality of your life, and one way to do that is to be more conscious of opportunity costs when you make decisions.
One way to do that is to plan your resources (time, money, energy, etc.) in advance.
In his 2011 paper, Opportunity Cost Consideration, Stephen A. Spiller wanted to examine how sensitive people were to opportunity costs in their decision making. In his study of 242 people, Spiller discovered that respondents who planned how they spent their income were more likely to consider opportunity costs than their counterparts who did not plan.
What’s the point here?
If you want to improve your consciousness of opportunity costs, you need to plan ahead of time when you’re not under any pressure to choose! While this obviously applies to money, you can see the same effect in various aspects of life. For instance, when you plan your day ahead of time, you’re less likely to ‘waste’ time on activities and choices that can derail you from your desirable destination