35,000. That’s the number of decisions we make every day.
It’s insane how much energy a single human brain uses daily.
The minute you wake up, you are already thinking about what to wear, what to eat for breakfast, how to spend your morning, how to spend your day, what to do first, how to get to work, etc.
It’s a process that quickly brains cognitive power.
“Decision making depletes your willpower, and once your willpower is depleted, you’re less able to make decisions,” wrote Roy F. Baumeister, in his book, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.
A single decision can grow branches and become a giant tree before deciding on what you want. The energy required for small decisions can impact your ability to make better decisions.
Don’t make a hundred decisions when you can make a few smart ones that remove thousands of others. It’s a habit that can save your brain energy for other important decisions.
Chances are, a lot of your sub-decisions are part of the same decision category.
To improve your decision-making process, replace some of your decisions with principles, systems and rituals.
“Principles are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behaviour that gets you what you want out of life. They can be applied again and again in similar situations to help you achieve your goals,” writes Ray Dalio (billionaire investor, hedge fund manager, and philanthropist) in his book Principles: Life and Work.
Decision fatigue has a price
“No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price.” — John Tierney
Making thousands of important decisions with future consequences can cause cognitive overload.
Cognitive exhaustion can lead to stress: which can make it even more difficult to make the next important decision.
For every vital area of your life: health, finance or career, list the essential decisions that can take care of unnecessary pondering.
For example, to consistently build wealth, you can research and choose a few index funds for your future and set up automatic payments for your investment accounts.
That single decision removes the need to watch stocks and decide on what could perform better in the future. You can’t beat the market — it pays to take a few calculated, and minimal risks whilst your money still works for you.
You can use the same principle for your health. Identify a few healthy food options you can eat without doubting your eating habits.
Plan your meals for the week and focus on buying those every week. Switch them up as many times as you want. You can expand your options to reduce the chances of getting bored with the same meals.
When you rely on a smart decision from the past, you reduce the number of decisions you have to make in the future.
Your cognitive load will be lighter if you can identify what drains your brain energy the most and replace those decisions with principles or systems.
If you wake up without a plan of what to do first, when to do it, what to wear or what to eat, you will spend all your brain energy on unnecessary decision-making processes that don’t improve your life in any way.
You can remove an infinite number of sub-decisions if you build systems and principles for almost everything you repeatedly do but cost a lot of time and energy to get the outcome you want.
You can quickly shut the door to other decisions if you establish better principles for your life.
You can design or create principles for what to read, when to sleep, how to exercise, how long to exercise, how to work and even where to live.
Tim Ferriss says this process is for “finding the one decision that removes 100 decisions.” Steve Jobs famously wore the same things every day to remove the fatigue of deciding what to wear in the morning.
When asked why he wears T-shirts every day, Mark Zuckerberg said:
“I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community. There’s actually a bunch of psychology theory that even making small decisions, around what you wear or what you eat for breakfast or things like that, they kind of make you tired and consume your energy.”
“You’ll see I wear only grey or blue suits. I’m trying to pare down decisions,” Barack Obama once said.
Designing principles and systems into your life protect time for other important decisions that may change the trajectory of your life.
It also defends time for deep work.
High performers make a series of high-level decisions that take care of hundreds of unnecessary decisions.
Start creating “good by default” principles and systems to reduce cognitive stress and reserve brain energy for important decisions.
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This post was previously published on Better Humans.
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