Decision fatigue has hit me hard this week. With the hustle and bustle of being back at work I’ve found that my energy levels have really dropped.
Heading home I’ve been tempted to buy takeaways or stop off at the shop to buy something quick and easy for tea. My brain just couldn’t deal with any more decisions and because I was hungry, I wanted food fast!
But thankfully, because I’d taken the time to write out a meal plan for the week ahead and had planned super-quick but nutritious batch cooked meals for work nights, I didn’t give in to the temptation.
What is decision fatigue?
Decision fatigue is the reduced ability to make the good choices throughout the day. The more decisions we have to make, the more fatigued we become.
The term was originally coined by Roy F. Baumeister to explain the emotional and mental strain we feel as a result of making too many decisions.
We live in a time where we are faced with more choices than ever before. We’re instantly contactable, stores are crammed with an overwhelming amount of products and everything is so accessible that we literally have the world at our fingertips!
Amidst all that, we have to take care of our basic needs – go to work, run our homes, keep ourselves healthy and find adequate time to rest. There’s no wonder we’re feeling the strain.
You may have heard that Mark Zuckerberg and the late Steve Jobs reduced their clothing down to only a handful of items. This was to cut the number of trivial decisions they had to make so they could focus on the important ones.
And I think that we can follow their lead… Don’t panic, I’m not going to suggest that you live with just 5 items of clothing (even Courtney Carver didn’t do that). But there are small tweaks that we can make to reduce decision fatigue.
How to reduce decision fatigue
The key is to form useful habits and routines which require very little thought. This might involve:
- Creating a weekly meal plan. Just 10 minutes of planning can reduce 7 decisions into 1 – and it’ll help you prepare your grocery list too.
- Developing an evening routine where you plan and prep everything you need for the following morning (work clothes, lunch, shopping list etc.)
- Having a morning routine to set yourself up for the day ahead and tick off some of your ‘must-do’ items. You might choose to work out, journal, meditate or tackle household chores. Use this time to do those little things that would hang around in your head taking up vital space.
- Automating some things. Whether it’s regular payments, savings or even grocery deliveries, automation can reduce the number of decisions we need to make.
- Decluttering. Our stuff takes up a lot of headspace, especially if you have to spend time looking for things because you can’t remember where you put them or you’re doing the clutter-shuffle just to be able to sit down. Decluttering can reduce those constant “I’ll sort it tomorrow” conversations that we all have in our head, and if we have less stuff we need to make less choices about what to do with it and spend less time maintaining it.
- Dealing with the bigger decisions at the start of the day when you’re less fatigued.
By doing these things, you will slash the number of decisions you have to make every day, freeing up more headspace for the more important things in life.
Decision fatigue and money
So you might be asking yourself what all of this has got to do with money. The simple answer is that decision fatigue affects everything.
From how much we spend and to how much we save, decision fatigue impacts how successful we are at achieving our goals.
Take the example I mentioned earlier about coming home from work – I was tired and hungry. Without my meal plan I’d have opted for a takeaway which would have resulted in me spending money and going over budget. That would have a knock-on effect on my goal of hitting my 10% FI number by next August.
Similar examples are all around us. You only need to walk into a supermarket to know how overwhelming the product choice can be. Go shopping without a list and you can easily be faced with a much bigger bill than expected.
That’s because we only have a finite amount of energy to make decisions with each day. So as we walk around the supermarket our effectiveness depletes which can lead to us making no choice at all and simply stuffing things into our basket to avoid having to make a decision.
Do yourself a favour and take a list with you to help you stick to your financial goals.
Automate your savings too. If you don’t you’re leaving yourself wide open to decision fatigue and over spending. Not sure where to stash your savings? Do the amount of accounts feel overwhelming? The key is to just start. Open a basic account and you can work out the best place later.
Decision fatigue can drain us and prevent us from taking the first step, so remind yourself that it’s ok to pick something that’s good enough for the moment. You can always change your mind later.
Next steps
We live in such a busy world that decision fatigue is part of our every-day life. If left unchecked then it can de-rail our plans and stop us from achieving our goals. But with a little bit of planning and a sprinkling of structure we can massively reduce the number of decision we need to make.
Take some time to consider where decision fatigue crops up in your life. How does it impact you? Are there any goals that it is stopping you from achieving? (Hint – look for those “I’ll do it later” moments).
Is there just one small change you can make today to cut down on the decisions you need to make? Do it and see how you feel after a month. Then try another one.
My small change is weekly meal plans. What will yours be?
Image courtesy of Victor He on Unsplash