Decision fatigue
I’m not sure why we all ignore the cost of making decisions, we tend to go easy and not have a plan for the upcoming days, weeks, and months. It is difficult to get a sense of where we are heading one day at a time, we need some overall idea of what a life well lived is and pursue that.
The more in-moment decisions we need to make, the poorer the decisions will be, and the reason is that we don’t have time, we will decide based on our instincts and emotions.
Deciding up front how our days, weeks, and months are structured is one way to avoid this trap of decision fatigue. As the saying goes, how we live our days is how we live our lives.
Mindful decisions
Take some time to figure out what an ideal day looks like, what a morning routine would look like when the production work should happen, and what a night routine might look like. After defining such a day it would be good to stick to it for some time, to allow the change to take effect. After a couple of weeks, it might be ok to overhaul the daily plan and repeat the process. The more decisions we can remove from each day, the more structured and in control we will feel. And we will be a lot less stressed because decisions are costly and we don’t feel good making decisions all the time. Invest upfront a little bit of time and remove a thousand decisions later on
The big picture vs the small picture
The best thing about deciding things upfront is that it is much easier to think big picture and then distill from that a daily plan. Thinking about how fit I want to become, what skills I want to develop, and what major milestones I am trying to reach this year, all these questions can be answered in an hour and distilled into a simple daily/weekly routine. When we are making decisions on the spot, it is very hard to think big picture, we are usually deciding in a small frame of mind, I have an hour of free time, do I watch YouTube or play video games? We could be asking the same small picture questions for years without stepping back and realizing, are those the only two choices for me?
Remove decisions and make your life a lot simpler and easier!