Reduce decision fatigue with 3 tips

In

,

By

Yassine Damil

Episode 6

TL;DR
  • Decision fatigue occurs when each decision depletes a limited decision-making capital, which can become exhausting, especially at the end of the day.
  • 3 tips to reduce it:
    1. Reduce daily decisions.
    2. Plan your decision-making moments.
    3. Allocate finite resources.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve noticed that the moment I crave a bubble gum (or bubble gums) (yes, I still have childhood tastes), or cider vinegar potato chips, is always at the end of the day. Then I came across this concept of decision fatigue, which convinced me to be one of the co-factors. But am I going to start wearing jeans and a black turtleneck, à la Steve Jobs? I’m not sure. In any case, here are my 3 tips for reducing and improving the decisions you make every day. Don’t ask yourself any more questions than that, let’s get to it!

What is decision fatigue?

The principle of decision fatigue1 presupposes that you start your day with a finite capital, which is gradually depleted by each new decision you make.

Imagine yourself at the end of a workday, still having to make decisions for the household, starting with dinner preparation. You’re even dreading a moment of relaxation like watching TV, since this time you still have to choose what to watch, and what’s more, compromising… I wonder if this explains the craze for the short video format offered by TikTok and co. It’s the new form of zapping, also known as doomscrolling, to scare people – legitimately…

Marketers – always at the forefront of emotional and psychological manipulation when it’s not metabolic (a topic in itself) – know how to take advantage of this phenomenon. That’s why there are those sweet-tasting snacks at the supermarket checkout: by the time you get there, you’ve already made too many decisions and don’t feel like asking yourself if it’s sensible (usually not!). It’s related, but let’s leave the topic of food overchoice for another time…

3 tips for reducing it

So here are my tips for making fewer, and ultimately better, decisions:

  • Reduce daily decisions: I suggested this in my introduction. The idea here is to eliminate certain choices out of hand. Sometimes, simply because the subject isn’t important enough to you, or perhaps extreme simplification or standardization has a point in its own right (think personal branding in the case of Steve Jobs). But I’d rather emphasize the power of routine. It’s particularly effective when it comes to diet (I’ve had the same oatmeal-based breakfast for several years now, and I’m doing just fine). Some people go so far as to make the same meals for the whole week (aka batch cooking2). Why not, as long as you make sure they’re perfectly complete, which is difficult. It’s also very effective – and I’d go so far as to say indispensable – for physical exercise. Of course, doing the same thing over and over again may seem boring (although it’s easier to see how you’re progressing), but it’s been proven3 that it’s precisely the training frequency that gives your body the signal to adapt.
  • Plan your decision-making moments: Instead of stressing yourself out all day about an important decision, you give yourself a dedicated moment to think about it and make it. This isn’t procrastination, because you don’t put off the task indefinitely. I’ll give you the example of a friend who had the good idea of handling all her administrative paperwork in the morning… ‘away’ from the children. Just by dissociating her professional subjects from her personal ones, part of the cognitive load4 is thus relieved.
  • Allocate finite resources: You can give yourself a finite amount of time to think about a task, or a deadline. This limit is obviously not arbitrary and should be based on what’s at stake. Choosing a house shouldn’t take as long as choosing a protein bar… You’d be surprised! Be careful, though, to allocate some of that time to examining all the possibilities (kind of a benchmarking).

Remember that having a daily routine is the best way to make fewer decisions. I may come back to the broader topic of decision-making and the role of intuition, but perhaps also to some of the topics I’ve touched on, such as information overload and analysis paralysis…

Here’s a personal hack: only make important decisions in the morning. To be more precise, I also take advantage of the old saying “sleep on it” in that – unless there’s an emergency – I’d already thought about it the night before. I recently realized that Jeff Bezos said in 20185 that he had much the same routine…

Fun Fact

Every day, an adult makes around 35,000 conscious decisions6 (compared to around 3,000 for a child). That’s a lot! Another source7 informs us that we make 226.7 decisions a day on our diet alone, just that…

Going further

References

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue ↩︎
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once-a-month_cooking ↩︎
  3. Zaroni RS, Brigatto FA, Schoenfeld BJ, et al. High Resistance-Training Frequency Enhances Muscle Thickness in Resistance-Trained Men. J Strength Cond Res. 2019;33 Suppl 1:S140-S151. doi: 10.1519/JSC.0000000000002643. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31260419/ ↩︎
  4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_load ↩︎
  5. https://www.youtube.com/live/xv_vkA0jsyo?feature=share&t=2490 ↩︎
  6. Sahakian B, Jamie Nicole LaBuzetta. Bad Moves. OUP Oxford; 2013. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/bad-moves-9780199668472 ↩︎
  7. Wansink B, Sobal J. Mindless Eating. Environment and Behavior. 2007;39(1):106-123. doi: 10.1177/0013916506295573 ↩︎