How to make creative decisions: 5 helpful frames

If you’re producing a creative project, there are a thousand ways to get it done. You can do it all yourself, or you can hire the famous agency to do it. You can push to have it published by next week, or you can take your time perfecting every detail. You can make sure it fits your vision exactly, or you can create many iterations and split test them. There’s no right or wrong way to create something. 

For a while, these decisions paralyzed me. That was until I saw a funny meme. 

The popular meme is embedded below, and it basically says that if you want speed, quality, and value, you simply have to choose two. The funny thing is that this may or may not have been completely true, but having these frames in my mind helped me make more confident decisions based on what the project was calling for. 

So I made a good guess on what the project was calling for. After a while, I began to discover that sometimes, the expensive vendors weren’t always the best. And the fast vendors weren’t always the quickest. It was just a general rule of thumb. 

I added a few more frames to my decision-making: opportunity and relationship. I realized that I could get great work fast and at a good value with someone who really wanted the opportunity. The same was true with people who really valued our relationship. The trouble with these was that they were limited resources. Once someone got the opportunity they were looking for, they started charging what they deserved. And once I called a favor in from a friend, I couldn’t do it again in good faith. 

There are two lessons here. First, find out what the goals of the project are, and make your decisions based on that. You might not be completely right, but you’ll get closer than if you didn’t use any frames at all. And second, you can always get a project done faster and cheaper if you find the right person.