(originally published 1/10/2017 on my personal LinkedIn page)

It is true that actions speak louder than words, and if our actions are truly what defines us as individuals then the quality of our decisions must be of great importance. After all, what we do is often a product of what we have decided to do. Following this logic, a critical step to improving oneself would be to focus on making better decisions.

Decision Fatigue

In psychology, “decision fatigue” refers to the deteriorating quality of decisions made by an individual after a long session of decision making. To put it more simply, making good decisions is exhausting. The more exhausted your decision-making systems become, the worse your decisions will be. This is not new information to those who stand to benefit from your bad decisions. This is why candy and snacks are placed right by cash registers at your local supermarket. After the countless decisions you’ve made while navigating the store aisles (not to mention anything else that day), they hope that you simply won’t have the emotional strength remaining to say no to that chocolate bar.

While there are several ways to combat decision fatigue, I will focus today on only one:

Fewer Decisions = Better Decisions 

If the quality of decisions made declines as a person makes more of them, then one may conclude that making fewer decisions will improve the average. If this is the case, there is a clear benefit to treating each good decision as something of great value and a finite supply. Recognizing the value of each of these decision units means that we must avoid wasting them at all costs!

A Case Study  

Many successful people across such diverse fields as business, politics, and the arts provide evidence of the benefits of reducing “decision waste”.  The image below is a sample of the results from a Google image search of the term “Barack Obama.”

The two-term president of the United States eliminated one simple decision from almost every work day. He decided to waste almost none of his mental capacity on the “what to wear” decision. He did this by narrowing his options to two or three variations of a dark suit jacket, a blue or grey tie, and a light shirt. By keeping to this “uniform”, he may have given himself the ability to make one more good decision each day! For other examples of this method of fending off decisions fatigue, one could look at the black turtleneck and jeans of the late Apple CEO Steve Job or the daily grey t-shirt of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

What other decisions can you cut out of your daily routine? Can you eat the same thing for breakfast, or at least slim down your menu? Can you stick to more of a routine in order to reduce the amount of times you have to ask yourself “what do I do next?” Examine your daily life for decisions of little consequence. Ask yourself if each one is a worth spending energy on every day or if you should just decide once and live by your decision.

Let Someone Else Decide

When I sit down to get a haircut in a new location, I am always asked the same question. “What do you want to do with it?” I always give them the same response, “You are the professional. I trust that you know more about what looks good than I do.”  I mean this when I say it. I do not live in a world where I spend a great deal of time and energy thinking about what hair styles are fashionable. I don’t know what hair products to buy or how to apply them. Who am I to tell a hair expert what to do with a head of hair? This person went to school to learn this skill, they got licensed, bought the tools, and works on hair 40 hours a week.

The haircut is a simple example, and one without a great deal of lasting consequence, but the act of trusting an expert is a great way to preserve your decision making abilities so that you can apply them to the areas where YOU are the expert.

In this way, we can all benefit. The hair stylist makes my decision, so that I can make a better investment decision for a doctor, who in turn makes a better medical decision for a police officer… and the chain reaction of better decision making continues.

Conclusion

Researching this post introduced me to many interesting thoughts about making better decisions, and I predict that I will not be able to resist pulling on several of the threads that I discovered. This is why I endeavor to share more of these strategies over the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, I encourage you to try reducing your daily decision count by eliminating or delegating a few items. I would love to hear how these tactics work for you.