Why It Takes You So Long To Decide What To Watch

It’s Friday night, dinner is in your lap (it's a box of pizza) now the pressure is on.  What To Watch?

It’s a tricky decision – one that’s all the more difficult when there’s the added time pressure of not letting your food get cold.

If you struggle with this, you can at least take solace in the knowledge that you’re not alone.

New research found that, on average, we typically spend 18 minutes going through Netflix’s archives before finally settling on that evening’s entertainment.

That means that if you’re watching something on Netflix just a few nights a week, you could be losing hours each month to indecision.

So why are we so bad and slow at making the low-stakes decision of what to watch? And how can we speed things up?

Related: Would You Rather Binge Watch A Show On Netflix or Watch One Episode Per Week!..

In the new book Solvable: A Simple Solution To Complex Problems, authors Arnaud Chevallier and Albrecht Enders, both of whom work as professors of strategy and innovation at IMD, tackle this.

Choosing a TV show might seem – in the scheme of things – inconsequential, but actually, it’s quite a complex decision.

’There are so many factors to consider. Your mood that evening – do you want light comedy or immersive psychological drama? What do other family members want to watch?

When you consider that 40% of those surveyed wanted to watch something different from their partner, 18 minutes of choosing time doesn’t seem so bad.