Flashback to April 25, 2013 when I matched with my now-husband Darryl on Bumble (shout out to those online daters out there!). Due to competing travel and activity schedules, we weren’t able to meet for our first date for several weeks. But since we clicked well in our first couple of Bumble exchanges, we texted each other a lot in those first few weeks.
As many online daters will tell you, it can be tricky texting someone new when you don’t know them well and don’t yet know their tone and style of communicating. So whenever the conversation led to something on the dicier side, we’d “pin” it to discuss when we eventually met. So me being me, took note of those items and when the big first date arrived, I threw them into a Word doc turning those pinned items into an Agenda—complete with a snippet image of the restaurant we were meeting as the header—printed it, and placed it in a folder for safekeeping.
Sliding that agenda across the table for Darryl to read—shamelessly I might add, because I’m proud of my Type A side—is what gave him the courage to admit that, in his efforts to conquer the dating game, he had created a spreadsheet to help him. Spreadsheets and agendas on the first date? Needless to say, it was a match made in heaven. I was intrigued and he went on to explain how it worked: it was a weighted list of his must-haves and nice-to-haves that he used to determine if someone he’d met online aligned with what he was looking for. If she didn’t, it helped him say no to pursuing things further.
Now flash-forward to the following Spring, when we made the big decision to move in together. We took that cherished, successful, but now-retired dating spreadsheet and transformed it into an apartment-hunting sheet. Once again, it worked magic for us and we quickly zeroed in on what we wanted in our first home together and managed to snag what we were looking for. Then, a few years later, when it was time to purchase our first home together we evolved the sheet yet again.
By this point, we’d describe our meet-cute to a lot of friends and colleagues who all, after the obvious fun-poking at Darryl’s and my mutual geekiness, expressed interest in this sheet, which we happily shared with them. This happened enough that we joked that we should really start to market it.
So now, join me here in the present day, when Erin M and I were at dinner with some mutual friends, chatting about recent career transitions. When I shared this story with her, adding that I’d yet again turned the sheet into one that would now help me consider my career direction, she was very excited. Not just at the prospect of finding a role better aligned with her values and strengths, but because she shared the same vision – we could help a lot of people navigate tough life decisions, especially given the decision fatigue that we know so many are facing these days. We were suddenly lost in a world of our own, sitting in that booth with our friends, excitedly brainstorming the potential. In addition to the sheet, we could also do the research and legwork to save people time and energy. Give them the tools and the resources they need to help them make these otherwise daunting decisions. Give them a community of like-minded people to commiserate with, much like we had with each other that night.
And that was the birth of Resolve Decision Tools.
With a shared passion for helping others and this thrilling vision in mind, Erin M and I created a tool to empower people to make confident decisions in various aspects of their lives. Our hope with Resolve Decision Tools is that we can give the support, tools, and community people need to navigate life’s biggest decisions with ease. We’ve read many books on decision-making (check out our book section), done a lot of research, talked to experts, and beta-tested the tool, incorporating a lot of feedback to get us to this point—and we hope to continue to gather feedback to grow this tool (and the app we’re developing) along with our community so that we can help more people make life’s biggest decisions with clarity.
From our story to yours, we hope Resolve becomes a part of your journey too.