Do You Have Decision Fatigue?
I don’t know about you but I'm setting up for a big 2019. I've been doing a lot of thinking around how I can perform at my best next year and how my clients can perform at their best and achieve their goals. I've been talking to people who I admire and who are leaders in their field, and I've been asking them about their success secret. How did they achieve so much? How do they fit so much into their lives?
A number of people have said to me that one of the things that they make sure they do is to limit the number of decisions they have to make in their lives so that they can avoid a thing called decision fatigue.
So, what is decision fatigue? Well, simply put, it's the deterioration of our ability to make good decisions after a long session of decision-making. It's estimated that the average adult makes about 35,000 remotely conscious decisions every day.* No wonder we can feel exhausted!
In one study in the US** , researchers looked at more than a thousand parole hearing decisions made by judges. What they discovered was that the most influential factor in whether someone was granted parole or not was what time their case was heard. Prisoners who appeared before a judge in the morning received parole about 70% of the time, while those prisoners who appeared late in the afternoon were paroled less than 10% of the time. Interesting, right?
You see, the more decisions you have to make, you pay a mental price. It’s just like physical fatigue but often, decision fatigue happens without us even knowing about it. We just feel tired, and exhausted, and just don't care anymore. Whatever!
Have you ever had this experience after maybe a long day of work, when you get home and your kids or your partner asks you what's for dinner, and you scream at them, "I don't freakin’ care what's for dinner! Eat a piece of toast"? I must confess that I’ve been guilty of that on many occasions. Getting home from work and feeling ‘Enough - Not ANOTHER decision!’
So what do we need to do to avoid this decision fatigue, and to perform at our best, and make the right choices? Here are my three steps.
Decide what decisions are important to you.
You’ve probably heard the stories of people like Barack Obama and Steve Jobs who wore a ‘uniform’ every day so they didn’t have to make a decision about what to wear. For other people, like myself, it might be what to eat. I’ve had the same breakfast every day for the past 22 years. Now for you, making decisions about what you wear everyday or what you eat might be important, but for other people it's not.
Set up a routine and structure around them.
You can delegate them to someone else, set up reminders, routines, checklists. Set and forget.
Prioritise them.
Those important decisions that you do want to make, you need to prioritize them. As that research showed around the judges in the US, it’s a good idea to make the important decisions as early in the day as you can, before you become decision fatigued. If you need to make decisions later in the day, create some sort of circuit breaker for yourself. Exercise. Go for a walk. Get out of the office. Eat something healthy. Meditate. Do whatever you need to do in order to break the circuit and come back to the decision making process refreshed.
It’s time to clarify what’s important to you and what you want to focus on in 2019. What are the important decisions that you want to make every day that will move you closer to achieving your goals and what are the decisions you want to let go of? The decisions that are just getting in your way!
Midja x
*How Many Daily Decisions Do We Make? UNC-TV: science.unctv.org/content/reportersblog/choices.
**Extraneous factors in judicial decisions, Shai Danzigera, Jonathan Levavb, and Liora Avnaim-Pesso, February 25, 2011. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1018033108 PNAS | April 26, 2011 | vol. 108 | no. 17 | 6889–6892.