Decision Fatigue

I recently listened to a Radio Lab podcast called ‘Choices’. The focus of the discussion was trying to understand how we make certain decisions in life, but also what can influence those decisions. The idea that decisions can be influenced doesn’t seem all that spectacular.  When you consider how many decisions we make daily, it’s not surprising that we get tired and the quality of our decisions drops.

The podcast recounts an experiment that shows how facing multiple decisions can affect our choices. In the experiment, two groups of participants are asked to memorize a set of numbers, then walk down the hall and recall those numbers. One group is asked to memorize two numbers, the other seven. They both leave the room and walk down the hall to recall the numbers, but are interrupted and asked if they’d like to have a snack as a thank you for participating in the study. The snack options are a healthy fruit salad and a big, not-so-healthy slice of chocolate cake. It turns out that the participants who only had two numbers to memorize chose the fruit whereas the ones with seven numbers were more likely to choose the cake. The researchers realized over time that willpower, problem-solving, and concentration all use the same part of the brain, and these cognitive resources are scarce.

In a recent Vanity Fair interview, President Obama shares that he has been influenced by research showing that the ability to make good decisions was like physical energy: it needs to be conserved during the course of each day. “You need to focus your decision-making energy,” he said. “You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.” As a result, he has sought to remove some decisions from his life. He wears only grey and blue suits. He alternates his morning workouts between cardio and weights. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.”

Steve Jobs and other business leaders have been said to make similar life adjustments. If you look at your daily morning routine and count the number of decisions made before coffee, you can see how you may not have as much brain power later in the afternoon. Perhaps that is why routines exist, to lessen the stress of the endless decisions. I don’t have to choose what to wear each morning, because I choose the night before. I don’t decide how I’m going to get to work, because I take the same route every day. More choice is not a bad thing to have, but we need to be mindful of our cognitive resources. When we use these resources in unproductive ways, we have less in the mental tank for the big problems or decisions.

I thought about how to apply this practice at work. There is no doubt that our days are filled with a myriad of tasks and decisions. What can we do to make things easier? My department has a library of templates and a detailed methodology that help the overall management of projects. When I start a new project, I know what is expected as a part of the methodology, which helps pare down the number of decisions I need to make.

Three key items that I found helpful when reading about the decision fatigue topic:

• Don’t exhaust yourself with small choices. Save your decision-making energy for what matters.
• Try to understand the motivation behind the decisions made.
• Recognize when you’re fatigued and avoid making decisions (if possible) at that time.

What do you do to reduce the amount of unneeded decisions, saving that cognitive power for things that really matter? If nothing, what *could* you do?