Decision fatigue is to management what carbon monoxide is to the human nervous system—a silent killer that can undermine an entire structure without anyone noticing until it’s too late. Decision fatigue can impact managers, senior employees, and other leaders tasked with making regular decisions that affect the operational success of a team. Decision fatigue can creep up on you and infect your entire team without you realizing it
That’s why we’ve written this article, because it’s so crucial for leaders to understand what decision fatigue is, how it operates, and what can be done about it.
What Is Decision Fatigue?
First, many of you may be wondering: what is decision fatigue, exactly? Let’s start with a decision fatigue definition.
Decision fatigue refers to the deterioration of the quality of the decisions someone makes over time. The fatigue factor refers to the fact that, as we make more and more decisions throughout the day, we are actually exhausting a finite supply of decision-making energy, and thus our decision-making capacities can become depleted.
Almost all of us have experienced decision fatigue at one time or another. However, as any manager knows, just because you’re exhausted doesn’t mean you can stop making decisions. You’re still the leader, and the team’s success still requires you to navigate the ship.
Decision Fatigue Symptoms
Let’s look more specifically at some of the main decision fatigue symptoms, so you can know when to recognize it in yourself.
Irritability: One of the first things that happens when you experience decision fatigue is you start losing your sense of patience and composure. Then you quickly start resenting the people and conditions you encounter. If you notice yourself getting irritable when you should be getting strategic, you’re likely suffering decision fatigue.
Exhaustion: It’s called decision fatigue for a reason. When you experience it, you’re likely to feel mentally and physically exhausted, especially as you try to make more and more decisions.
Procrastination/Avoidance: When you find yourself putting off decisions—or, worse yet, avoiding them altogether—it’s a good sign that you’re suffering decision fatigue.
Impulsiveness: When you no longer have the capacity to fully consider important decisions, you wind up taking shortcuts, over-relying on defaults, and making unconsidered decisions just to rid yourself of the burden of having to make any decision at all. This can lead to fatal mistakes.
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Decision Fatigue Examples
Decision fatigue doesn’t just show up in the workplace. We all experience it in many areas of life. Let’s consider a few decision fatigue examples.
Ordering Food at a Restaurant
Have you ever sat down to dinner after a long day, and as you flip through the menu, you find yourself utterly incapable of processing all the choices and making a decision? This likely isn’t the menu’s fault—though many restaurants do include far too many choices on their menus. Rather, you’ve probably worked yourself to a state of decision fatigue. You just don’t have the capacity even to decide what you want to eat for dinner.
Making an Offer on a House
The home-buying process can be extremely stressful. First, the market offers a plethora of choices, but doesn’t wait for you to make your decision. Second, there are so many factors to consider: location, size, aesthetics, function, price, and more. It can feel overwhelming and impossible to make the right decision. You might find yourself wishing you could just keep renting forever.
Both these decision fatigue examples are similar to the kinds of decisions managers have to make. While choosing an entree may seem like an extremely small investment in comparison to a house, a decision is still a decision. And the challenge of decision fatigue in such a low-stakes scenario should demonstrate just how hard decision fatigue can be for managers tasked with making highly impactful decisions all day long.
How to Beat Decision Fatigue
Okay, so now that you understand what decision fatigue is, let’s look at how to beat decision fatigue.
It’s important to recognize that we are all vulnerable to decision fatigue, and each of us has a finite capacity for making decisions on a daily basis. Here are steps to take in order to beat decision fatigue.
- Triage- Determine what the most important decisions you have to make are. Prioritize those. Grant them your most powerful and immediate resources, saving less important decisions for later.
- Limit your Regular Decisions- While you don’t want to over-rely on defaults, they can be helpful for preserving your decision-making capacity. There’s a reason Steve Jobs wore the same outfit every day—by eliminating the choice of what to wear, he preserved that energy for more important decisions.
- Set Deadlines for Making Decisions- Decision fatigue can lead to waffling and postponing important decisions—and thus perpetuating decision fatigue.
- Limit your Information- If you can eliminate options from a decision you have to make, excellent. And make sure the information you’re considering is only what’s most important to the actual decision at hand.
- Start Early- We naturally have the most energy for decision-making in the morning, and we gradually give it away over the course of the day. Be careful not to wait until the end of the day to make an important decision.
Conclusion
Decision fatigue is something every manager will have to deal with regularly. Our brains only have so much energy for thinking strategically and weighing choices against one another. By understanding how decision fatigue operates and how to prevent it, you’ll be putting yourself in a better position to make optimal choices in the areas that matter most.