How to avoid decision fatigue

Over the years, I have taught a lot of classes on creativity, and I once had a student ask me whether it would benefit their creativity if they took a different route to work each day. While changing up your environment can create serendipitous engagements with things that might spur a new idea, changing up your daily commute would mostly make you spend time and effort thinking about how you get to work when that time could be better spent in other ways.

More generally, you have a limited amount of daily energy to focus and get really good productive work done. You should spend that energy on things that matter rather than things that don’t.

You have probably heard about the concept of decision fatigue, in which having to make repeated low-level decisions taxes you to the point where you feel mentally useless. There isn’t something special about selecting a course of action from a set of options. It is really about using your daily energy supply in an unproductive way. Having to evaluate a set of options, envision the consequences of selecting from among a set of options, and then choosing takes a lot of work, and so it is a particularly efficient way of draining your battery.

Here are three things you can do to preserve your energy.

Use habits wisely

First, remember that most of your actions don’t need to involve choices at all. The reason to take the same route to work each day is that your entire routine from leaving the house to arriving at work can largely be automated. When you repeat an action in a context frequently, you ultimately create a habit out of it. Those habits can be executed without soaking up mental resources, which leaves you free to think about more interesting things, and won’t decrease that daily mental energy store for productive work.

Be strategic. If there are situations in your work and personal life that occur frequently for which you can create a routine or schedule without causing problems, do it. You don’t necessarily need to go full-on Steve Jobs and wear the same outfit to work every day, but you can significantly narrow the number of things that require choices each day.

Optimize the effort/accuracy trade-off

In addition, respect the effort/accuracy trade-off. The more effort you put into a choice, the more likely you are to reach an ideal decision. Whether you should choose the ideal option, though, depends a lot on the consequences of a bad decision. If you’re choosing something to eat for lunch, pick something acceptable (what the Nobel Prize winner and psychologist Herb Simon called satisficing).

Spend only enough time with your choices to reach the point where the outcome is acceptable. There are rare cases—work you’re doing for an important client, for example—that require your absolute best effort. If you tend to deliberate over even small matters, you’re ultimately decreasing the quality of truly important work that needs your best self.

Train, delegate, and trust

If you’re being asked to make lots of decisions each day, there is a chance that you’re micromanaging others. Your expertise does not have to be brought to bear on every single decision that affects your sphere of influence. But if you don’t trust the people around you to do the right thing, you may feel like you have to engage with every detail of a project.

Instead, work with your team members to teach them your approach to decisions. Help them to understand the criteria you think matter for the biggest decisions. You can oversee their work a few times until you feel that they have developed their skill. While that training process may take a little longer than making all those decisions yourself, it pays off in the long run. You can now feel more secure delegating responsibility for a significant number of choices to others and weigh in on a select few situations. Not only does this strategy help you preserve your mental capacity for important work, it also ensures that there is a rising generation of excellent leaders behind you.