On the One Hand

Pizza or tacos?

One way to determine whether something is a good idea or not is to consider the pros and cons. If you have enough time, you might divide a piece of paper in half, then list all the good things on the left hand side, and all the bad things on the right.

If you have even more time and a little bit of knowledge, you can do a SWOT analysis where you outline not only the Strengths and Weaknesses of an idea, but also specific Opportunities and Threats an idea might present. There are plenty of digital tools, too, designed for this sort of analytical deep dive.

Those tools are valuable because making a tough decision like this requires mental focus, and your poor brain can only hold so much information in there at once.

The tools that we’ve been using for the longest amount of time are the ones attached to our body, and that certainly includes our hands. Hands can help a great deal with the sort of problem I’m describing, where you have a lot of information in your brain and n…