Dealing with decision fatigue

Do you want to hear an insane stat? The average human makes 35,000 decisions* every day.

Most of those decisions are pretty small – what do you want to eat? Should you bring a sweater to work? Do I reply to this email now or later? – but they still take up a lot of cognitive energy. And by the end of the day, you’ve made so many of them that your brain is tired.

Decision fatigue happens to all of us. And when it strikes (late afternoons or evenings), you’ll struggle to make more decisions. You’ll be slower and/or you won’t choose things that you would have in the morning.

(If you’ve ever planned to cook healthily after work and then ended up on Uber Eats, that’s exactly what I mean.)

Decision fatigue is real, and you can’t get away from it. So what do you do?

The best way to tackle decision fatigue is to make big decisions when you’re at your least tired so that later you can just focus on executing.

For example, this newsletter goes out Wednesday mornings for me so I write them the night before. (Yeah, I know.) It usually takes me over an hour to write a post – not because I’m a really slow writer, but because I spend about 45 minutes trying to settle on a topic!

To mitigate the decision fatigue, I now choose the topic in the morning before work. I write a draft headline and some bullet points, and then when I get home all I have to do is expand on my outline. Executing on the plan is way easier than coming up with the plan.

If you know decision fatigue is coming, you can adjust your schedule to suit it. Make those better choices earlier, and then prepare what you can so that the easiest, lowest friction thing for your tired self to do is just follow through on the plan.

Some examples:

• Buy ingredients for dinner in advance so that you don’t get last-minute takeout

• Break down big projects and order your tasks in the morning so that you can just power through in the afternoon

• Set up your comfy reading spot on the couch with that book you’ve been meaning to read so that you don’t default to phone time

This post ended up a bit more in evening routine territory than I’d planned, but I figured I’d leave it in since it definitely impacts my work performance. (Plus, I do enough work in evenings that this is relevant anyway!)

Do you notice when in your day you tend to stop making fast, good decisions? 🤔

*Note: weirdly, I can’t find the source of this number… but I’ve read it in enough articles that I reckon it’s in the right ballpark. Point is, it’s a big number.