Choosing between pistachio and chocolate ice cream is easy. I love pistachio and hate chocolate. Choosing between grabbing ice cream with a friend and finishing a book on a Saturday afternoon is difficult. Decisions become challenging when both choices involve responsibility. In this essay, I will discuss my ideas of what responsibility is, where it comes from, how it affects you, and how to manage them.

You become responsible for a task when you are willing to spend resources such as time, effort, and money. This explanation could seem vague since responsibility is seen as something you must fulfill to avoid punishment, but as the example of grabbing ice cream with a friend suggests, the border of responsibility reaches further. Working as a software engineer you could be assigned some code to debug from your team lead. You become responsible to fix some code and you are now willing to spend your time and effort to improve the code. In this case, the responsibility came from an external source. The team leader who assigned you the responsibility could punish you if you fail to fulfill your responsibility. The consequence could range from a serious e-mail to losing your job. In another case, the responsibility comes from yourself. You set a goal to become fit by going to the gym three times a week. The responsibility comes from the motivation to become fitter but there are no potential consequences besides not getting a six-pack since only you are involved with this responsibility. So responsibilities come from both internal motivations and external assignments.

We see responsibility like puzzle pieces and try to fulfill all of them to complete the perfect picture. In reality it is closer to choosing ice cream flavors with a limited bucket size. Try to choose too many then it would overflow and you would make a mess. Just like a six year old kid who wants to try all the flavors in the shop, we become greedy with responsibilities. We want to build our career, get six packs, call our parents often, and grab gelatos with friends when they want to.

A rabbit hole that people fall into often while prioritizing responsibilities is that we tend to overestimate short-term consequences and over-prioritize responsibilities from external sources. Roy Amara, a Stanford computer scientist suggested how we overestimate the impact of technology in the short-term and underestimate it in the long-term. This rule is applied in our decision-making as well. We feel responsible to stay healthy to avoid sickness such as diabetes, cancer, and others in the long-run. Yet when we are in a situation with a short-term responsibility ahead such as an imminent mid-term exam, we would instantly give up healthy choices to do better on the exam. Getting a high GPA could be important but it is questionable if a high GPA is more significant than a healthy life. Surely one could argue that living unhealthy for a short exam period is negligible but if we always repeat the choice of throwing away long-term responsibilities for short-term ones, we are essentially not fulfilling long-term responsibilities. The second rabbit hole is we over-prioritize responsibilities that involves other people. This could range from a task assigned by your boss to a scheduled meetup with your friends. We all have been to gatherings avoiding more important responsibilities. I have gone to too many events during exam period that I committed to before. Reflecting it on it now, I could have simply apologized and studied for the exams.

Just like a kid who cannot stop thinking of the flavors they did not put in the bucket, the responsibilities that we did not fulfill haunts us. And kids have parents who tell them that the ice cream flavors in their bucket are the best and the ones left at the shop are actually horrible. After choosing between responsibilities we suffer from our doubt on whether we made the right choices. So choosing the right responsibility to pursue among many consists of two parts; choosing the right ones and having confirmation that they were the right ones. These two could be tackled by clarifying your priorities. Your priorities could range from career to romantic life and working on a new hobby. It does not matter if your priorities could look petty from other people. These have to be your priorities, things that you would spend your time and effort on. Having a good priority list would save you from the dilemma of choosing between responsibilities.

A popular alternative is utilizing small chunks of time. For instance, you could use your commute time to reply to all your emails. On the surface, this could seem like a good way to tackle the overflowing number of responsibilities you give yourself. Unfortunately, if you blindly utilize all the resources you have, especially time, without having the right priorities you could become a honey bee who made the most amount of honey, except you were working for the wrong hive. If you know your priorities and you are stuck in a dilemma between two responsibilities, (1) you do not need to stress since you already have a good idea of which one matters to you more, and (2) you would not stress from the one that you did not choose. Setting your priority list might not choose how many responsibilities you have on your plate but it helps you choose the right ones within your allotted resources.

Prioritize your responsibilities, choose what matters to you, and save yourself from unnecessary guilt of giving up the rest.