When One Focus Becomes 50 Decisions

Lately I've been concerned that I've drifted away from 5 Great Decisions. Here I am — the Founder of 5 Great Decisions. I hold the registered trademark. And yet my recent recordings read more like a list of what I accomplished that day than decisions at all. Less a practice, more a checked-off to-do list.

The reason isn't hard to find. We're four weeks from closing on the house we've lived in for over 40 years, and every day brings dozens of decisions — keep or sell, box or donate, worth the move or not. It's no wonder my recordings started to sound like a task list. That's most of what my day actually is right now. My life isn't asking for five different kinds of intentional choices. It's asking for fifty — all about the same thing.

The more I sat with that, the more I realized the problem wasn't the number of decisions or where they were coming from. It was what I was recording about them.

5GD has always been about a "why" — a reason for choosing intentionally, rooted in the future you're trying to create. The decisions don't need to come from five different areas of life; they just need to be the ones, however many or few, that move you toward who you want to become. Right now, my “why” is this move. Every box I decide to keep or release isn't just a task to check off — it's a choice about what I'm carrying into the next chapter of my life, and what I'm setting down for good.

I hadn't been thinking about it that way. I'd been recording what I did, not why it mattered. The decisions were the same either way — but writing down why a decision matters is what connects it to the future I'm intentionally building. Without that, even a meaningful choice can look like just another task on a list.

So, I'm trying something different: instead of listing what I accomplished, I'm naming what I'm intentionally creating by giving this project my full attention today. Not "I packed the kitchen." More like: I chose to let go of dishes we haven't used in a decade, because I want to walk into our next home with less weight and more room to breathe. Same decision. Different lens. One is a task completed. The other is a future being stepped into, one box at a time.

This move was never just about getting a house ready to sell. It's the work of stepping into what comes next — and every decision along the way is part of that.

5 Great Decisions doesn't have to come from five different corners of your life. Some seasons — a move, a new job, a health situation, a demanding stretch with family — ask for the opposite: one focus, many decisions. If that's where you are, try asking two things:

What future am I building with this? And why does it matter?

Those two questions are the practice, however many decisions show up in a day.