Dealing with Decision Fatigue

Do you know what Tom Ford, Karl Lagerfeld, and Michael Kors all have in common? Yes, running a multibillion dollar fashion empire would be one thing. But another shared quality is that they each essentially wear the same thing every day.

That's right, these three fashion titans who sell us on clothing trends and thousands of unique styles year-round, don't take the advice of their own marketers. Some would call this misleading, others would say it's having a signature look, but I refer to it as a way to avoid decision fatigue.

Decision fatigue is a theory in psychology that indicates "that after making many decisions, your ability to make more and more decisions over the course of a day becomes worse." There is only so much mental energy we have to give each day and our allotment wanes by each decision we make.

This outfit decision has been common amongst several icons. Steve Jobs was famous for the reoccurring black turtleneck and jeans look. Others like Mark Zuckerberg and former President Obama have also been known to wear their own style of "capsule" wardrobes. With so many important decisions to make during any given day, it can be nice to take one off the board early. Otherwise, even something as small as picking out clothes can be a part of this compounding of decision fatigue.

But this is far from limited to choosing our outfits.

In just about every area of life, we face an endless number of options of things to do. It's an arms race for our attention. Everything has to be better, faster, and stronger. In an era of optimization, simplification can be intoxicating. This may be one reason why the concept of "minimalism" as a lifestyle has been growing in popularity in recent years.

A similar way to think about this is through the "paradox of choice," a concept popularized by Barry Schwartz in his 2004 book about how having too many choices paralyzes customers. Instead of more options of a type of product or service benefiting our experience, it actually overwhelms us and we'll often retreat from the decision or fall back to a traditional option.

We live in a Cheesecake Factory menu-society now, where there are options for the sake of options. There is nothing in human psychology or basic restaurant economics that makes having a ridiculously long menu a good idea, and Cheesecake Factory's executives know this. But the unique length of their menu acts as a marketing ploy to get people talking.

The problem is when that kind of technique is no longer siloed off to one restaurant chain but spreads like a virus into every fiber of our way of life.

When we sit down at night to scroll through streaming services like Netflix, it's impossible to land on a show to commit to. With dating apps in large metropolitan cities, there is no reason to commit to a partner when there are hundreds of potentially better options teasing us on the digital horizon. When we are constantly reminded that there may be something better for us around the corner, there will often be a strong urge to chase it.

Decisions, decisions, and more decisions...it's exhausting. And when we're tired of making decisions, then we settle. But at the end of the day, who really wants to settle?

We seem to have come a long way from four television channels, job ads in the local newspaper, and a mating boundary of a hometown neighborhood, but today's endless options leave us with nothing but anxiety and dissatisfaction.

The reality is that the genie is out of the bottle and there is no going back to a world without near unlimited choices. The only thing we can control is how we respond to them.

If you're feeling the weight of this burden like I frequently am, let's think about how we can reduce the inputs that are short circuiting our brains. By eliminating the number of relatively unimportant choices that we have to make in a day, that might offer us more clarity and energy to focus on the ones that really matter.

Until next week, have a wonderful day.