Reducing Decision Fatigue
The best way to manage decision fatigue is to make fewer decisions. This is the path to greater willpower, productivity, and happiness.
– James Clear
Decision fatigue is the idea that after making many decisions, your ability to make more good decisions over the course of a day becomes worse.
The quality of the decisions is not the only thing that suffers. We, the decision-makers, feel more tired as a result of spending our mental energy on all the choices we have to make.
Thinking ain’t cheap. As mentioned in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, our brain makes up only 2–3 percent of our body weight, our brain consumes 25% of our energy when the body is at rest. By comparison, the brains of other apes require only 8% of their resting energy.
There is no shame in asking for help
I always considered myself a self-taught learner, thinking it was a strength. I was wrong; it was a weakness.
When I stopped trying to learn piano by myself and hired a teacher, I found that I could put my energy on following the study plan my teacher developed for me. I stopped spending endless amounts of time deliberating what the next lesson should be.
Don’t be ashamed to need help. Like a soldier storming a wall, you have a mission to accomplish. And if you’ve been wounded and you need a comrade to pull you up? So what?
– Marcus Aurelius
A teacher is not only an expert on a subject but also a helper who takes from the student the burden of finding the best way forward. I trust my teacher’s judgment and focus only on execution.
Critical thinking is invaluable. Please use it to realize when you can delegate your thinking into someone or something else.
Sometimes we delegate to humans, like I do with my piano teacher, and sometimes to machines, like every time we set the GPS in our car.
Paradox of choice
In The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, psychologist Barry Schwartz argues that having too many choices can lead to anxiety, paralysis, and dissatisfaction. He explains that the abundance of options in modern society can overwhelm people, resulting in decision fatigue and a decrease in overall happiness. Schwartz suggests that reducing the number of choices available and embracing the idea of good enough can help people make decisions more efficiently and feel more satisfied with the outcomes.
The jam experiment
The Jam Experiment is a famous study on choice overload.
I’ve found about it while listening to The Happines Lab. I use every opportunity I have for recommending this podcast to everybody.
The experiment demonstrated that too many choices can lead to decision paralysis and reduced satisfaction. When given 24 jam options, more customers were attracted to the stand but fewer actually made purchases. Compared to when only 6 options were presented, fewer customers approached the stand, but a larger percentage of them bought something.
The experiment demonstrated that while a larger number of choices may initially attract more interest, it can lead to choice overload, making it harder for people to make a decision and, ultimately, reducing their likelihood of making a purchase.
Focus on what matters
Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things.
– Tim Ferriss
By letting AI helping with the prioritization of non-critical tasks, we free up resources for the things that matter in our life.
I will now give some ideas on how we can start delegating small decisions to our friend ChatGPT.
Don’t make me think
Netflix recommendations failed because they make us think.
For some reason I can’t really explain, I kept a record of all the movies I watched in the last years. You can check it out in my IMDB profile.
I gave ChatGPT all these ratings and asked for movie recommendations. So far the results have been quite decent to be honest.
Minimalistic guidelines also work fine. Providing your preferred genre, directors or actors is a shortcut to a good result.
I don’t put much thought into it and watch the first recommendation it throws at me.
I know that these will not the best movies I’ve seen in my life. I’m sure that those will come from my friends’ suggestions.
I don’t mind, I’m not looking for a life-changing movie every time I sit on the couch. Sometimes I want distraction and a “good enough” movie does the trick.
Deep work
I’m a big fan of Cal Newport and his ideas around deep work.
Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task.
– Cal Newport
In his book, scheduling deep work sessions was a recommended strategy to get meaningful work done. I perform my best when setting aside dedicated blocks of time free from any distractions.
I also recommend getting a visual timer like 👇
Let’s use ChatGPT as a personal assistant for maximizing our uninterrupted focus time.
Scheduling
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail
– Benjamin Franklin
Here is the prompt:
I want you to act as Virtual Assistant GPT (VAGPT), my personal assistant who will help me to schedule my day.
The idea is to be as productive as possible by drawing a realistic schedule that includes breaks.
I will provide you with the tasks I need to do today and their duration. You will help me schedule them throughout the day.
Guidelines:
- You can only scheduPle tasks from 9:00 to 20:00.
- Try to plan the day so I can finish my duties as soon as possible.
- Prefer 15-minute time buffers between tasks. 10-minute buffers are possible but less preferred.
- Some tasks are more cognitively demanding than others. I would like to evenly distribute across the day the difficulty of the tasks.
- Your output should be an overview of my day and the content of a file that I can import into my Google Calendar.
For today I would like to achieve:
- 3 piano practice sessions. Each session lasts 15 minutes and they should not be scheduled close to each other.
- Walking my dog for 45 minutes at 18:00. There are 30 minutes of flexibility on when this can be scheduled.
- 30 minutes of reading a book.
- 60 minutes for doing my Dutch homework.
- 30 minutes for cleaning my car.
- 80 minutes for going to the gym.
- 30 minutes for lunch between. Ideally to be scheduled from 12:00 to 13:00.
- An hour for dinner around 19:00
- 60 minutes for writing a blog-post.
- Add one 20-minute coffee-break.
The schedule generated was:
| Start | End | Task |
|---|---|---|
| 09:00 | 09:15 | Piano practice session 1 |
| 09:30 | 10:00 | Reading a book |
| 10:15 | 11:15 | Dutch homework |
| 11:30 | 12:00 | Cleaning your car |
| 12:00 | 12:30 | Lunch |
| 12:45 | 13:00 | Piano practice session 2 |
| 13:15 | 14:35 | Going to the gym |
| 14:50 | 15:10 | Coffee break |
| 15:25 | 15:40 | Piano practice session 3 |
| 15:55 | 16:55 | Writing a blog post |
| 17:15 | 18:00 | Walking your dog |
| 19:00 | 20:00 | Dinner |
It honored all the specified constraints but we can do even better. Let’s incorporate some feedback:
Examples always help ChatGPT to get a better grip of the idea. Let’s give it another spin!
Voila! It even explained how to import the file into Google Calendar 
Conclusions
When I searched for usages of ChatGPT to increase productivy I found dissapointing results. Obvious usages such as:
- Correcting typos and grammar
- Writing emails
- Explaining complex topics
- Getting motivational quotes (I doubt about the effectiveness on this one)
I just wanted to show you that ChatGPT is so powerful that using it just as a replacement for Grammarly is kind of like an insult.
Be bold and creative. The more you use it, the more usages you will find!
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