Minimizing Decision Fatigue by simplifying daily decisions
Productivity: Making time for important big decisions

What shall I wear today? What should I eat for breakfast? What should I cook tonight? Who is going to pick up the kids? Who is going to take them to soccer practice? Where do we invest? Do we buy or sell? Who should I invite to this meeting…Every day we make hundreds of decisions from small routine ones to large life-changing ones. I read that we make about 35000 decisions a day. 35000 decisions a day! Just hearing that makes me tired. Decision fatigue is real.
Decision fatigue is dangerous as it makes us susceptible to making reckless decisions on important questions when we are tired. We can replenish our energy in making decisions by taking breaks during the day or by eliminating some of the decisions that take up our energy.
"We all make choices, but in the end, our choices make us." — Ken Levine
I have felt burnt out by decision-making. To make mental space for big decisions, we can leverage a few techniques to simplify our lives. I have tried a few different techniques and a few of them are below.
Minimizing decision fatigue by reducing the number of decisions a day
Repetition: We can simplify the most common daily decisions by simple repetition.
Clothes - Wearing a uniform or selecting clothes from a very small wardrobe can be really freeing. I had adopted a uniform for a couple of years before the pandemic. That eliminated my decision-making every day. I didn’t have to think about which clothes to wear. I just had to pick one set of uniform clothes. I had 10 pairs of the exact same clothes and all I had to do was to pick one without worrying about how I looked or which meetings I had to go to. It helped that picked a uniform that felt true to me. I wrote about it after a year into adopting a uniform here
Food - Some people especially those on a special diet or a diabetic diet will have the exact same thing for lunch every day. This helps them maintain their sugar levels. If we adopt the same concept in our lives it can simplify too. My high school son eats the same wrap for lunch every day. This makes my life extremely easy as I don’t have to think about what to make for him. I have the system down for groceries as well. It saves me time in cooking too as I am super efficient at it after making a million of those wraps by now.
Reduce Options:
Shopping - I don’t shop at a lot of stores. I identified a couple of retail stores and an online one for all my grocery, clothing, home, and other needs. This helps me not have to think about which store to go to now.
Gifts - Do you have a few go-to gift ideas? Maybe legos or books for kids, flowers for some occasions, etc.. Having a set of ideas to go to avoids situations where we are overwhelmed by choices.
Food - Have 2-3 options for breakfast every day. Then the choice is limited and kids or we end up having to pick from a smaller set of choices and decisions become easier
Less is more - Overall just having/owning/doing less will reduce choices and simplify our lives. If we just buy fewer things, own fewer things, and do fewer things (but well) our choices are simplified and leave us mental bandwidth to do better work more deeply.
Defaults: I have defaults if I am not up for a decision. For ex., if I don’t want to decide what to do when I have free time, I have a default podcast to listen to while I rearrange my kitchen. If I don’t know what to cook, I have a default of making sandwiches.
Routines - I try and find routines that I can get into for decision-making as well as simplifying life. Routine of always leaving at the same time, taking the same route to work, waving up at the same time, a schedule that goes smoothly every morning, after work, over the weekends, before a school year starts, or over the holidays simplifies decision making. Waking up at a set time every morning means that you don't have to spend time every night deciding what time you have to wake up the next morning. These routines will help us get some low-importance tasks on autopilot.
Habits - Daily habits remove the need for decisions. This is especially important for those situations where you know you might not make the best decision. If you dislike exercising, then creating a habit of walking every day after lunch for just a few minutes will remove the decision of whether or not you want to exercise today. Creating habits is not easy but doable as BJ Fogg shows us how to create habits in his book “Tiny Habits”
Frameworks - Spending time in designing a framework for decision or creating a process simplifies decision-making further. Having principles, and creating a decision making matrices are just examples. A few of them for PMs and startup founders are written by First Round Capital.
Planning ahead - Being organized and planning ahead will simplify the number of decisions we have to make.
Checklist - In his book “The Checklist Manifesto”, Atul Gawande shares how simple checklists can significantly reduce human errors in complex profession such as medicine. Checklists minimize the need for us to repeatedly think about the steps in an important task and spare our mental strength. However, checklists have to be used thoughtfully to avoid making mistakes because they have become very routine.
Create a plan - I love reading. I spend 15 mins every few weeks creating my backlog of reading. I have articles saved, books ordered or rented, and ready to go. So when the time comes on a daily basis, I don’t have to decide. The podcast, book, or article is ready for me to digest. Similarly, for my family’s cooking needs, I have weekly meal plans ready to be picked. Along with it, I have grocery lists ready to go. All I have to do is add my default order list to the app I shop from and I am ready to go.
As you use these frameworks it is important to keep in mind two things
Spend some time thinking about routine decisions that you don’t want to make every day and apply the right technique to minimize decision making for that task.
Be thoughtful as these techniques will put us in an autopilot mode and might end up in mistakes. Hence be always mindful and thoughtful even in the most mundane of the tasks.
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