You Don’t Have To Make Every Choice
Decision fatigue is the documented decline in the quality of choices people make after extended periods of decision-making. The average adult makes roughly 35,000 decisions per day, most of them trivial, and each one depletes the same finite pool of mental energy needed for the choices that actually matter. The good news is that decision fatigue isn't an inevitable part of modern life; it's largely the result of refusing to automate, delegate, or simplify the hundreds of low-stakes choices that eat up cognitive bandwidth before noon. Here are 20 practical ways to preserve your decision-making capacity for the things that deserve it.
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1. Wear The Same Thing Every Day
Steve Jobs wore black turtlenecks, Mark Zuckerberg wore gray t-shirts, and Barack Obama rotated between two suit colors during his presidency, all for the same reason: clothing decisions are trivial but frequent. Creating a personal uniform eliminates the morning closet debate and frees up mental energy for decisions that have actual consequences.
2. Meal Prep
Cooking your weekday lunches and dinners in a single afternoon removes five daily decisions about what to eat and how to prepare it. Meal prepping also eliminates the 6 p.m. panic that leads to ordering takeout because you're too tired to think about dinner. The initial time investment pays off in reduced cognitive load throughout the week.
3. Establish Default Meals
Rather than scanning your entire mental catalog of possible foods every time you eat, rotate between three preset breakfast options, three lunches, and three dinners. This approach maintains enough variety to prevent boredom while eliminating the paralysis that comes from unlimited choice.
4. A Good Morning Routine
A morning sequence that never changes removes all the small decisions about what to do first, how long to spend on each activity, and whether you have time for coffee before your shower. The specific activities matter less than the consistency; the goal is to eliminate decision points before you're fully awake.
5. Clothes Prep
Selecting your outfit while you're still coherent in the evening prevents the bleary morning scramble through your closet when your decision-making ability is at its lowest. You'll also catch wardrobe malfunctions like missing buttons or stains when you still have time to fix them.
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6. Make Important Decisions In The Morning
Studies tracking decision quality throughout the day consistently show that people make better choices earlier, before their mental resources have been depleted by hours of smaller decisions. Schedule meetings that require strategic thinking, financial planning, or difficult conversations before lunch whenever possible.
7. Use A 90-Second Rule
Spending 90 seconds to categorize each task as urgent, important, or neither prevents you from wasting decision energy on things that don't require immediate attention. This quick triage lets you batch similar tasks together or defer low-priority items entirely.
8. Set A Daily Limit
Committing to making no more than two or three significant choices per day forces you to defer, delegate, or default on everything else. This constraint sounds restrictive until you realize how many decisions you're currently making that could easily wait or be handled by someone else, making you much more selective about what qualifies as worth your mental energy.
9. Batch Decisions
Grouping your email time into a single 30-minute block, making all your phone calls consecutively, or handling all your administrative tasks at once reduces the cognitive cost of switching between different types of decisions. You'll even get faster at each type of decision when you're processing several in a row.
10. Take A Break Every Hour
Stepping away from decisions for five to 10 minutes allows your prefrontal cortex to recover some of its depleted capacity. These breaks work best when they involve actual rest rather than scrolling through your phone, though. A brief walk is much more effective than a visit to the Instagram timeline.
11. Delegate Routine Choices
Asking your partner to pick the restaurant, letting a colleague choose the meeting time, or having a family member handle grocery shopping for the week removes decisions from your plate entirely. Most people are willing to make these choices when asked directly, and the mental relief of not having to decide is worth the loss of control.
12. Trust Your Gut
Spending 20 minutes debating where to put a bookshelf or which pen to buy is a waste of decision-making capacity that could be spent on things with actual consequences. Overanalyzing trivial choices is one of the fastest ways to drain your mental energy before you've accomplished anything meaningful.
13. Filter Decisions Through Your Core Values
Establishing two or three non-negotiable principles lets you automatically reject options that don't align with them, which eliminates entire categories of choices without deliberation. If one of your values is environmental sustainability, you can instantly dismiss products with excessive packaging without weighing their other merits.
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14. Use Checklists
Creating a standard packing list for travel, a template for weekly grocery shopping, or a workflow for routine work requests removes the need to rebuild the same decision structure every time. Checklists also prevent the mental fatigue that comes from trying to remember whether you've forgotten something.
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15. Limit Your Options
Capping yourself at three dinner recipes to choose from, two workout routines to alternate between, or five podcast episodes to consider prevents the paralysis that comes from unlimited choice. Artificial constraints can lead to less stressful and quicker decision-making.
16. Resting Well
Sleep deprivation impairs the prefrontal cortex, which handles executive function and self-control, making every decision harder and lower-quality than it would be if you were rested. Adequate sleep is the most effective way to restore your full decision-making capacity.
17. Practice Mindfulness
Five minutes of focused breathing or meditation reduces the stress that compounds decision fatigue and helps reset your mental state between difficult choices. The cognitive benefits of mindfulness practices are well-documented, particularly for attention and emotional regulation.
18. What’s Most Important?
Trying to weigh every possible data point when making a decision leads to analysis paralysis and depletes your mental resources without improving outcomes. Identifying the three most relevant factors and ignoring the rest produces faster decisions that are usually just as good as those made with exhaustive information.
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19. Prepare Work Items The Night Before
Setting out your laptop, organizing your notes, and queuing up your first task the evening before eliminates the morning decision about where to start. This preparation is especially valuable for people who struggle with motivation in the morning, as it removes the activation energy needed to begin working.
20. Physical Movement & H2O
Physical movement and hydration both improve cognitive function and help counteract the mental fog that accumulates during extended decision-making sessions. These breaks don't need to be long; just standing up and moving for a few minutes or drinking a glass of water can restore enough clarity to tackle the next decision effectively.
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