Reading seven books about indecisiveness is a fairly elegant way to keep not deciding

There is a decision I have been not making since February. I am not going to tell you what it is, because the shape of it is irrelevant and because describing it would constitute, in a small way, progress.

In March I bought a book about how to make decisions. By August I had bought six more.

What I actually measured

Seven books, each bought specifically to resolve one outstanding decision. For each I logged the purchase date, the date I opened it, the date I finished it, the page count, and whether the decision had been made at any point during or after.

That last column contains seven identical values.

The books took between three and nineteen days. The three-day book, How to Decide, is the one that most forcefully recommends deciding immediately. I read it fourth.

What I think it means

The honest reading is that buying a book about a decision is a way of doing something that feels adjacent to the decision while remaining, in every measurable sense, entirely outside it.

Research is the only form of procrastination that produces a receipt.

Each book had a framework. Six of the seven frameworks required, as a first step, writing down the options. I have written down the options nine times across four notebooks. The lists are substantially identical. One of them is laminated.

Confounds, of which there are several

• The decision may be genuinely hard. Nothing here separates avoidance from difficulty, and a reader who wanted to be kind to me would point that out.
• Reading time is not deciding time. I could have been deciding on the train. I was not, but I could have been.
• n=7, one subject, no control, and the subject knew what was being measured throughout. This is the weakest possible design and it still found something.

The part I did not enjoy

Somewhere around book five I started noticing that I was choosing the next book carefully. Comparing editions. Reading reviews of books about how to stop reading reviews.

The decision remains unmade. There is an eighth book in a tab I have not closed.¹

¹ It is about overthinking. It has 384 pages.