Decision Fatigue: Not so known enemy of personal productivity.

Idea’s and experience to get over it!

Have you ever feel exhausted while deciding something? I do.

We take thousands of decision’s everyday, in terms of our daily chores like from what to wear to our life long goals and missions. Those decisions we take knowingly or unknowingly involves mental energy and time.

It starts with your morning alarm and ends with your bedtime reminder. In between of it, every moment of your day you face endless choices and decision making while we do so, we feel exhausted and that’s what I understand as Decision Fatigue.

It is becoming difficult to keep on making choices and tiresome now adays. At least, for me personally. I am trying to move on towards least decision making with respect to my everyday life.

Here is the ‘things’ to overcome your decision fatigue:

1. Accept

It all starts with a very basic understanding of human nature; even if you take life-time to decide on something, you can’t be sure if it’s right or wrong.

Accept that — Decision or choice is never right or wrong. It is your best judgement of that time and situation and it can change at any moment.

2. Action

Think less, Act More. Yes, we all procrastinate and keep on thinking about things or events of past and future. Over thinking about any decisions do not guarantee betterment of our decision. It only makes it more complicated and tiresome.

Act as soon as possible on the decision and stick to it.

3. Automate

Build your own System -workflow to automate your routines like things to do on daily, weekly or monthly basis. In this regards, I found time blocking and day theming helps a lot.

To give you an example: Professionally, I have to work on different industrial verticals and I have themed my days with 2 Hrs. of time blocking dedicated to specific industrial vertical. This helps me to build a system around it and I do not have to think or plan for it, it’s build in my routine.

Delegate your not so important tasks and build a system of trust with your teammates and partners where you don't have to involve yourself in all the decision making.

4. Cut down your OPTIONS — Limited Choices:

We are trapped in the universe of endless options and choices, initially I found having multiple choices is good but the amount of time and energy it takes to choose is absolutely not worth. The same goes for any decision you have to take, the idea is to go for LIMITED Choices — eliminate and factor out the options that do not working out for you and it will make your life a bit easy.

Not everyone of us can be a minimalistic but surely we can work out with limited choices.

5. Build your FOCUS

Let’ agree, it is way easy to get distracted. A phone call or a notification or simple and random thought and our mind goes for a long-walk. It it a call of the time to build our FOCUS. If we are too engaged in our daily decision making, we end up loosing our focus on the things that really matters.

Focus and deep work helps us in thinking clearly and improving our decision making quality: A beautiful quote from Naval Ravikant

Clearer thinker is a better compliment than “smart”

Thanks for reading.

Keep reading, keep sharing.

Astu.