Decision Fatigue and You

The term “decision fatigue” has become part of our everyday vocabulary.  We know that we make thousands upon thousands of decisions per day.  We know that as we make more decisions, the quality of our logical reasoning and our decisions goes down.  We know all this intellectually.

Somehow, we have to move this from knowledge to experience.  Knowing about decision fatigue doesn’t do us a lot of good.  As a sort of abstract concept, grounded in science but not in experience, it can feel like decision fatigue just is what it is.  Like there’s nothing we can do about it. 

While I think we should all experience decision fatigue as a reality for ourselves, I’ll never suggest that you decide to experience decision fatigue by overloading yourself with decisions.  That may give us the “Oh, that’s what that feels like” moment we need, and it’s highly likely that we’ll notice later that the decisions we were making toward the end weren’t great ones.  But making a problem worse in order to experience it fully is abusive, and I like to help people make better decisions, not worse ones.

Instead, here’s a gentler, less dangerous suggestion for you: conduct a decision audit.

Pick a length of time.  Maybe you choose 15 minutes, or 30, or 20.  During that time, make a note of every single decision that you make. 

If you’re really ambitious, record what decisions you made.  If you’re more human like the rest of us, just tally each time you make a decision.  Choosing to start your decision audit, and choosing how long you’re going to audit your decisions, are both decisions and you need a tally for each of them.  Then keep tallying.

Did you choose to answer the phone or let it go to voicemail?  Tally that.  Did you choose to stand up and stretch or power through your tasks?  Tally that.  Did you choose to have a snack or get some water?  Tally that.  Did you choose to accept a proposal?  Tally that.  Did you choose which candidates to ask to return for a second interview?  Tally that.  (Did you choose whether or not to continue your decision audit?  Tally that too, every time.)

I recommend doing your decision audit during a “normal” bout of activity.  If you prep for a team meeting every single week, that’s a good time to do your audit.  If you complete a monthly report, do your audit while you’re creating your report.  If you run a series of tasks nearly on autopilot, this can be an enlightening time to do a decision audit—you may be making more decisions than you realize during that time.

At the end of your allotted time, add up how many decisions you made.  Are you surprised?

Then, because there should be a second part to this, do the same process when you’re in a completely different sphere of life.  If your first decision audit took place during work hours, do your next one while caring for your kids, or grocery shopping, or working out, or volunteering.  Once again, are you surprised at the number of decisions you made?

Of course this isn’t a random exercise just for kicks.  Instead, this should give you a clear understanding of how many decisions you personally make, and some ideas for how to make better ones.

Here are two suggestions you can try.  First, make sure that important decisions are made earlier in the day.  If we get fatigued the more decisions we make, and we make more and more decisions as the day goes on, then it only makes sense to try to make the really important decisions before we get worn out.

Second, reduce the number of decisions you make.  If you’re always sorting through the random collection of pens on your desk to find the one you want to use, order yourself a full set of pens that you like and get rid of the rest.  That’s one less decision to make.  This concept of a uniform or a standard can work for everything from software and equipment choices, to meal planning, even clothing choices.  Pare down the options to make the choices easier, or perhaps nonexistent.

Reducing the number of decisions that you make is a strategy which works within specific timeframes too.  If your organization has an important decision to make, one that will have a significant impact on your operations or your reach, that decision should be the only one you make that day.  Don’t schedule multiple meetings.  Don’t add more things to the agenda because you’ll have everyone together already.  If you’re not in charge of the meetings or the agendas, still find ways to reduce the number of decisions you will make by yourself that day.  The decisions you do make will be better for it. 

Make better decisions by experiencing and understanding how many you personally make, then reducing that number where you can.

This blog post was written by Amie Pilla, without the assistance of generative AI.

Copyright Amie Pilla, 2025, All Rights Reserved