I read somewhere that the average adult makes about 35,000 decisions a day.
Most of them are invisible.
What to wear, which email to open first, whether to have the almond latte or the flat white, and which of the sixteen nearly identical shades of ‘off-white’ paint will make the spare room look less like a hospital ward.
We treat this abundance of choice as a win for personal freedom. But the reality is that decision fatigue is a luxury problem that is quietly rotting our ability to do meaningful work.
Every time you weigh up two trivial options, you’re burning the same cognitive fuel you need to solve a complex client problem or design a new service model.
I’ve noticed that the most productive periods of my life aren’t the ones where I’m “grinding” harder; they’re the ones where I’ve aggressively automated the mundane parts of my day so I don’t have to think about them.
The ‘Small Stuff’ Tax
The friction isn’t usually the big, strategic choices. We gear up for those.
The real thief is the silent friction of modern life:
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the fifty streaming shows you scroll through for half an hour before giving up and going to bed, or
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the endless toggling between tabs because you haven’t decided which task is actually the priority.
In a professional services firm, this manifests as ‘bespoke everything’.
Should we send this report as a PDF or a link?
Should we book the meeting for 45 minutes or an hour?
When every tiny step requires a fresh micro-decision from the founder, the business hits a ceiling. Not because you lack talent, but because your brain is exhausted by midday from deciding things that should have been settled months ago.
Three Areas to Automate
I’m a big believer in reducing the surface area of your choices.
If you want to reclaim your focus, start by ruthlessly standardising these three areas:
Your Morning Engine
I don’t want to decide what time I wake up, what I eat for breakfast, or what I’m wearing. I want the first two hours of my day to be on rails so my brain is fresh when I actually sit down to work.
The ‘Client Path’
In your firm, there should be a ‘default’ way work flows.
Don’t decide how to onboard a client every time someone signs a letter of engagement. Set the track, build the checklist, and only deviate if there is a massive, high-value reason to do so.
The Information Filter.
Stop deciding whether to read every newsletter that hits your inbox. Unsubscribe from 90% of them. If it’s important, it’ll find you.
The mental energy spent ‘triaging’ junk is energy you aren’t spending on growth.
We often think more options make us more powerful. In reality, it just makes us slower.
The goal isn’t to be a person who makes thousands of decisions; it’s to be the person who makes five or six really important ones exceptionally well.
If you feel like you’re spinning your wheels, take a look at your day. How much of your ‘work’ is actually just you negotiating with yourself over trivialities?
Sometimes the most innovative thing you can do for your business is to stop giving yourself so many choices.
