Decision Fatigue
Imagine every morning, you have an "energy bar" floating above your head. This is not unlike a video game like The Sims or whatever where it represents a character's energy levels. But in this case, this "energy bar" represents your decision making abilities. Every decision you make, whether large or small, takes up a little tiny bit of energy. "What am I going to wear? What will I eat for breakfast? Lunch? Dinner? What am I going to say to my client at my meeting this afternoon?"
Because you've had to make so many choices at the beginning of the day, your ability to make good decisions by the end of the day becomes severely affected and then the poor judgment sets in.
"Should I hit the gym tonight? -- nah I'm tired and its too much work to go home to get my clothes anyways so I'll just chill out this one night.
"What am I going to eat tonight? -- I'm crazy drained so instead of cooking something, I'm going to grab a burrito bowl from Chipotle on the way home--"
and so on and so forth. The next thing you know you've been parked on your couch with your laptop, Netflix binging on the just-released "Friends" episodes for the past week.
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| But hey at least you know what happens to Ross and Rachel now |
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| The "cat" package is all you have? Sure I'll take it |
Decision fatigue doesn't just cost us a few bucks at the end of the check out line at the supermarket, it also affects a prisoner's ability to get paroled. In a study made by the National Academy of Sciences, psychologists found that judges were more likely to parole prisoners earlier in the day, as opposed to later in the afternoon, after they had worked a few cases and after food coma starts setting in.
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| Curse you, tryptophan! |
Automating Decisions
So what are some things you can do in order to counteract decision fatigue? One key is automation. if you can come up with a routine that automates all the small, seemingly insignificant decisions, then you can conserve your precious brain power for more important things.
For example, instead of having to make something like 10 different decisions the second you wake up in the morning, if you have already pre-determined what you are going to wear and what you're packing for lunch the night before, then those things are simply off the things you need to worry about for the day. Instead, you can be focusing on more important things, like figuring out how to impress your clients or your boss at that 9 o'clock meeting at work.
If you want to have a chance of keeping a semi-regular gym schedule, you can automate half of the process by simply keeping your gym clothes in a backpack in your car. In this case, the whole bit about having to make the extra effort to go home, change, then go back out into town gets skipped and you can avoid getting caught up with the million things you have waiting for you at home.
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| its a trap! |
Lastly, if you had already pre-determined what you are going to have for dinner (for example, its Taco Tuesday!), then either 1) you possibly had the wherewithal to get the necessary ingredients to make dinner earlier in the week when you were grocery shopping, or 2) you already know what you're going to get from the store, immensely cutting down on the amount of time you spend lingering around the baked goods aisle.
In any event, being able to automate as much of your day as possible saves you from having those lapses in will power that we can fall into later in the evening.
Setting Priorities
The other thing that's just as important is priorities. If you are faced with making a huge decision, such as purchasing a car, schedule that towards the beginning of the day when you have the most energy. That way you will have a better chance at holding firm on your purchasing decision when a salesman tries to pressure you into buying into a bevy of extended warranties, options packages, or service plans. And if its a big enough commitment that it takes up most of your day, then prioritize and push off all the other small things until you get the big thing done first. If you're in the middle of negotiating something, but you have to return a DVD before 6 PM in order to avoid a 5 dollar late fee, then take care of the more important thing, bite the bullet and pay the fee. It seems silly to let a 5 dollar fee get in the way of closing a several thousand dollar deal.
For the most part, there's nothing wrong with our decision making abilities. We know that we need to avoid time traps, empty calories, or things that otherwise waste our money or resources. But due to those times of fatigue, we can lapse into moments of weakness. But being aware of our "energy levels" as it were and installing systems whereby we can automate and set aside all the minutiae of life, then we'll be in a better position to achieve our goals and succeed.
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