You can’t force yourself to think faster. If you try, you’re likely to end up making much worse decisions. As your business grows you get further away from the machinery or the animals and you are managing the business, lots of information and people. Your day probably consists of trying to make the right choices among competing options, meaning you have to process large amounts of information, discern what’s likely to be most effective for moving towards your desired goal, and try to anticipate potential problems further down the line. And all the while, you’re operating in an environment of uncertainty where anything could happen tomorrow.

When the product of your job is your decisions, you might find yourself wanting to be able to make more decisions more quickly so you can be more productive overall. Chasing speed is a flawed approach. Because decisions—at least good ones—don’t come out of thin air. They’re supported by a lot of thinking.

Making good decisions is hard work. There’s a limit to how many decisions you can make in a day before you need a break. Making good decisions requires constant learning and verifying what you think you know.

If you want to make better decisions, you need to do everything you can to reduce the pressure you’re under. You need to let your brain take whatever time it needs to think through the problem at hand. A great way of doing this in a farming business is to focus on ways of simplifying the business. Sometimes it means less output but because it increases time available, it reduces stress resulting in better more timely decision making, resulting in increased profitability without extra capital or time employed.

So, you need to get out of a reactive mode, recognize when you need to pause, and spend more time looking at problems. “Gut feel” and making decisions “on the hoof “can be very risky. Managing risk is all about making informed decisions.

A good metaphor is installing an update to the operating system on your computer. Would you rather install an update that fixes bugs and improves existing processes, or one that just makes everything run faster? Obviously, you would prefer the former. The latter would just lead to more crashes, but lots of dairy farmer solutions to fixing the problems of insufficient profit is to expand and run faster and have more decisions to make, which causes more stress, which leads to……

For a fresh overview of your business from an independent perspective from the experts who run businesses themselves, contact Gerard Finnan at gerardfinnan@fcgagric.com or your local FCG Office.