Decisions, Decisions...

I'm not sure, what do you want to do?

I ask for the same thing every year for my birthday; a day free of making any decisions.  One glorious day per year where no one says anything to me that ends with a question mark.  Every year I envision a day of me just floating between events somehow designed perfectly for me despite an absence of my input.  Then I wake up and enter the real world that doesn’t care what a 40 year old man “wants” for his birthday.

Depending on which (entirely unverified and therefore probably made up) report you read, we make between 70 and 35,000 decisions per day.  Between two million and a trillion in a lifetime.  

I need a nap.

Here enters decision fatigue, which might be real and might be bullshit, but is definitely real.  Essentially what happens as the days, weeks, and months of decision making in our lives stacks up.  It leads to the inability to make reasoned decisions, avoidance of making decisions at all, energy depletion, and a drop in ego.  Steve Jobs’ turtlenecks seem more forgivable now (more, not entirely).

I’ve read about tactics for battling decision fatigue and a lot of them say (in effect) you should make your biggest decisions at the beginning of your day.  Start big.  This strikes me as a lot of things, most importantly not terribly practical.  I’m all for the Tony Robbins approach to life but my days start more often with a crying baby jarring me out of sleep than deliberately and intentionally waking up attacking the day.  I don’t know that I’d call it the ideal environment to make the biggest decisions of my day.

So I’ve landed on the opposite; make small decisions first.  I don’t think decision fatigue is as much a result of the volume of decisions made as it is of the volume of decisions differed.  

This morning I couldn’t decide between eggs, granola, or a protein shake for breakfast.  I thought about it for five minutes, got distracted, and as I type this I'm just now realizing I haven’t had breakfast yet. Worse yet, while “deciding,” I sat down and “checked” LinkedIn for 15 minutes. No need to start real work, I’m still deciding on breakfast…  I’ve been up for four hours and all the while my subconscious has been holding onto that stupid decision and allowing it to sap far more energy than it was worth.*

That’s some fraction of my internal energy that didn’t go to finishing this post (that’s late), or to deciding on the length of my new apartment lease, or replying to a counter on a proposal I’m negotiating at work.

Snowballing decisions from small to large might be the answer.  Smaller decisions have less liability and so it’s much easier to make them without fear of consequence.  Action begets action and so making small decisions to start the day is the fuel needed to make bigger and bigger ones as the days, weeks, and months go on.  If decision making is a muscle of sorts it makes way more sense to me to start by limbering up versus running a marathon.

One of my favorite all-time quotes is from Cicero (yes, I had to look up who said it).  “More is lost by indecision than wrong decision. Indecision is the thief of opportunity. It will steal you blind.”

B

*Just after I finished this sentence my wife brought me a shake.  She didn’t ask what I wanted and I was entirely content with her executive decision.  Happy belated birthday to me.

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