Fighting Decision Fatigue
I always eat boiled chicken breast, broccoli, and pasta for lunch. So much that my family laughs at me.
They think I'm boring. But what they don't know, is that I am choosing my battle in decision making & productivity.
I've always hated wasting time, especially when it comes to making decisions that I don't care about. So I figured out what matters to me and what doesn't matter to me, this way I can skip making decisions that I don't care about (reducing decision fatigue).
Some examples of how I fight it:
- Eat the same food all the time
- Wear plain color t-shirts and shirts
- Set running schedule so detailed (what day, run how far) so I don't need to think about "how much can I push today" and usually give up
And I can easily get 5 more hours a week and use them towards what I love. I share more of my thoughts about productivity and fighting decision fatigue here.
What are somethings that you're happy to give up decision-making power and save time?
Love to see if we can share these productivity hacks with each other :)
This is a smart approach, cutting the small stuff so you have decision energy left for what matters. I have found the harder version of this problem shows up once you are running more than one business at once. You cannot really automate away which customer complaint or which decision is actually urgent, since that changes every day. The best I have managed is being ruthless about checking in on a schedule rather than reacting to every notification as it comes in, which sounds similar in spirit to what you are doing with food and clothing.
I buy stuff in store when I can rather than online. Online shopping is such a time suck that I really cannot stand it. I don't even care if I'm saving a few dollars, I don't want to spend any more time than I have to researching if I should buy product A or product B, reading reviews, etc.
That's so true - sometimes we just overthink it and spend way more time than it is needed before buying something. Good tip!
Wow quite inspiring, I'm a productivity nerd as well😅
Haha love this term, I'm sure there are a lot of us out there!
I would say when it comes to building something, choose technologies you already know. I think its easy to want to build something using some new fancy technique but sticking to a proven technology you know will free up your brain for all the other business decisions you need to make. The caveat here would be if the technology you are building requires something new. For example the founders of Tuple wrote their app in C++ for performance reasons, since performance was a key value prop of their app. But they started with Ruby (pretty sure) since they knew it already.
Nice one - so doing the familiar things instead of always picking up the new trends, this def save time!