Freedom to choose can feel like a luxury, or what we strive for in lots of situations. Yet the experience of trying to wrangle some initial analysis for my PhD into something others can make sense has made me reflect on how what feels like a good thing can also make it harder to act.

In another lifetime I wrote briefings and requests for approvals aplenty. Very formulaic documents, with standard templates in the organisations I worked for, and in line with institutional isomorphism, the expectations and approaches of the sector too. It can feel quite boring to crank the handle on those kind of documents, but having that pre-existing scaffolding in place for the document is also really helpful. Now that I’m trying to pull together some notes on a strand of the research, I’m definitely trying to figure out the structural approach and I don’t have the comfort blanket of a pre-existing structure. Or at least, there probably are those structures but as a newbie to this world I don’t know them.

And given within the PhD, and more generally, I’m interested in how people take action, and feeling how my reaction to the lack of that comfort blanket of pre-existing parameters affects my ability to act. That tension within myself between enjoying the ability to shape how the work is presented, a bit of wondering what ‘good’ looks like, and a sense of options upon options opening outwards with choices and trade-offs feels like a lot. And in the absence of that sense of what ‘good’ looks like, it’s then a bit harder to get a sense of what might lead me to make one choice or another.

That sense of finding it difficult to choose between options reminded me of an interview I conducted earlier in the week. The interview was with someone about their experiences of home and how they find deciding and going out about home improvements. They described feeling very overwhelmed about trying to figure out what to do their home, particularly when thinking about environmental improvements such as heat pumps. In amongst the rest of their life activities, trying to make sense of heat pumps, how they worked and what the practicalities were felt even more complicated. That was then exacerbated by the costs – in time as well as money – that meant making the ‘wrong’ decision, felt more fraught.

Fun and perhaps unsurprising to feel connections between different types of decision. Looking forward to exploring some of the literature in this area to see what has been found or explored already, and connecting that to my connecting the dots activities…