The daily grind of deciding
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The daily grind of deciding
And the paradoxical freedom of not having to choose
Decision fatigue is real. It’s the mental exhaustion that comes from having to make thousands of little, and a few big, decisions every day, until you die, and perhaps even then, too: After all, if you’ve been responsible, you’ll have planned for what happens post-death to spare your loved ones the pain of making decisions while grieving.
In the meantime, the less-momentous choices—what to wear, what to eat, what route to take, what to watch—take a daily toll. This toll is compounded for those of us surrounded by people who think they’re being helpful by always saying, “It’s up to you! I’m happy with whatever!” Oh great, now I have the pressure of deciding for everyone.
Whatever your situation, you’ve probably hit a mental decision-wall at some point and wondered why a list of four salad options is giving you an anxiety attack. It’s not the salad, it’s the decision fatigue.
This is why the internet gave a collective thumbs up to this very relatable tweet:
Decision fatigue really catches up to me at mealtimes, when I’m traveling, and when I’m asked to make choices about things I don’t care that much about (cue a long blank stare). The end of the day or week is also a bad time to ask me to make up my mind about something. Little decisions begin to feel overwhelming and I revert to what I think of as “toddler headspace.”
When my daughter was little and I was therefore regularly in the company of other kids, I noticed how toddlers often had meltdowns when asked to decide between more than two things at a time. “What socks do you want to wear?” or “Which cereal bowl do you want?” became triggers for some truly hairy scenes.
For us GenX parents, the authoritarian “you get what you get and you don’t get upset” parenting model was out the window. But offering too many choices wasn’t necessarily a kinder way to parent little minds already so busy trying to grasp the world. My compromise was to pre-narrow to range of options so my kid felt somewhat empowered, but not filled with existential dread at every turn.
Unknowingly, this was my first encounter with a form of decision fatigue, and like the piercing wails of a toddler, it stuck with me. More choices don’t always make us happier.
IMPORTANT CLARIFICATION: I do not mean that we should have choices taken away from us! I am pro-choice, in all the ways! It’s not cool to limit choices for other people, unless you’re trying to give a two-year old a snack.
When it comes to protecting our own mental energy though, it can be helpful to reduce the sheer number of decisions we have to make each day. Our brains are always looking for ways to do this, developing tidy routines and rituals that don’t require much conscious thought. I like to help my brain out a lot in this regard by giving her a break whenever I can.
Perhaps this is why I’m such a devotee of habits, streaks, and schedules, especially when they get me through the tough parts of the day. Who am I kidding? All the parts of the day. I started eating the same breakfast every morning in early 2012 and I’ve never stopped. I empty clothes from my closets every couple of months not just because I’m a pathological declutterer, but because I don’t want to have to choose among too many items when I get dressed. If I book a hotel, I almost always book with breakfast included because the thought of having to make pre-coffee decisions in a new city makes me want to lay down on the floor and cry.
Is there a part of me that wonders if evacuating so many choices from my daily life is eliminating the possibility of spontaneous fun? Yes. I admit I worry that all the sameness is turning me into a very boring person, conservative, even. A woman laughing with salad, the same salad, every day. When does making smart plans to lesson decision fatigue turn into a kind of rigidity that I can’t break out of?
I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know that facing an endless list of lunch options when I’m hangry isn’t actually going to enrich the texture of my life that much. Jennifer Aniston apparently eats the same salad every day and she seems to be doing very nicely, thank you. So maybe I can set that worry aside.
Decision fatigue and the problem of prioritization
As an academic career coach, I see how a form decision fatigue creeps into the arguably more-important-than-salad world of choosing what tasks, goals, and projects to prioritize. Clients feel as though they just don’t know how to set priorities for their days, weeks, or years. Some of this is connected to the conflation of urgent and important tasks. Some if it though, I think, is about the overwhelm that comes from having so many possible items to choose from, and the relatively higher stakes of making choices that feel like they’ll affect your entire career.
I’m thinking about this right now as I move into a busy September. I’m back from a sabbatical, so my workload has multiplied. I have, I would say, four major things that I need to work on this month, in addition to teaching, writing this Substack, and my coaching sessions. I time-blocked the hell out of my first week to make sure I could do some work on all four. Then I got COVID.
There isn’t really a lesson in that beyond “best laid plans, etc. etc.” But as I got out my planner for the second week, I decided I needed to narrow my focus. I asked, If I can only work on two of the four tasks this week, which would I feel the most relief about making progress on?
When asked this way, the answer was pretty obvious, so I’m blocking time for those two only. Narrowing the range of options will, I hope, give me some reprieve from worrying about finding time for all four or deciding which to focus on.
Other stuff will undoubtedly come up, but I’ll try to use another anti-decision fatigue/prioritization trick to stay on track. This one is another simple question to ask when potential distractions come along: Will it help me make progress on my chosen tasks? If the answer is no, and it’s almost always no, then it’s no to whatever the thing is.
One of my other favourite tricks for combating prioritization decision-fatigue, especially when juggling several projects, is to apply a version of the “snowball” debt repayment method.
For those who haven’t heard of it, it’s a way of managing the process of paying down more than one debt. If you have three debts, for example, making only the minimum payment on each isn’t going to get you very far, and the interest will keep adding up. So the idea is to pick one—maybe the smallest, maybe the one with the highest interest payments—and put as much money toward it as possible. You keep making the minimum payments on the others. When debt 1 is paid off, you throw all the money you were paying on it toward debt 2, and so on.
Now imagine you have three work projects, or three writing projects, or even three household tasks that you want to do. If you just dribble small amounts of effort and time into each, they’ll all make some progress, but maybe not a lot. Annoyingly, they all keep hanging over your head, running through your mind. And every day, or week, you have to decide which you’ll work on and when, and probably second guess yourself every step. So exhausting.
The snowball method takes some of that stress away. You decide on one project where you’ll put the bulk of your time, and make “minimum payments” on the others, just enough to keep them alive. When project 1 is done, you snowball the effort into project 2. Every day, you know where to put most of your energy. Decision fatigue diminishes.
Free up some of that precious executive functioning
It takes A LOT of energy to run these supercomputers called brains. Whatever shortcuts we can build into the program saves some of that energy for stuff that matters more. It doesn’t have to be about becoming more efficient either, especially not for your boss or for “the hustle.” It can be about freeing up space for creativity, connection, insight, reflection, and new ideas. Maybe cutting down on decision fatigue can help you feel like a more relaxed parent or co-worker or friend. Maybe it just helps you fall asleep faster at night (amen).
I’m about to go grocery shopping for the week, and you know what? I’ll be having the same breakfast and the same lunch every day, and future me will be so happy I don’t have to decide on any of it that she won’t even care if she looks like this:
What I’m reading: Exiles, by Jane Harper, is a mystery that really kept me guessing, with an eventual resolution that still felt right.
Listen, if this is you, it’s ok. I know some people are positively bedeviled with anxiety about voicing opinions in these situations. You don’t want to disappoint anyone, you were never allowed to make choices for yourself, you’ve had your choices put down. Valid! But help your pals out a little by at least narrowing the range of options: “I don’t feel like Indian but I’m up for the other choices.” “Maybe a comedy would be good tonight?” “I have a slight preference for soft cheese over hard.”
By this point I was feeling much better. I don’t advocate for trying to work through Covid or any other illness.