Reducing Mental Effort – Part 7

Our series on reducing mental effort continues. This is the final piece in the series. Reduce decision fatigue Consider how many times you may ask yourself questions like these during a typical week: What should I do now?What should I eat?What should I wear?Do I feel like exercising today?What should I watch now?Should I go out or stay in? Even if you don’t ask that question consciously, your subconscious mind still has to address it. Or do you ever have thoughts like these come up? I should go shopping soon.I really ought to do laundry.I should catch up on emails.I need to remember to pay my bills this week.When am I going to find time to _____? Are you really facing unique and different options each time you ponder these questions and thoughts? Or are you actually making very similar decisions each time? Your work and your typical days probably involve a lot of patterns. You can leverage the predictability and stability of your known patterns to make many decisions less often. And you can also replace some chaotic decisions with patterns to systematize your daily and weekly flow even more. A common objection here is that if your life becomes too predictable, it will become boring because you’ll be removing so much of the surprise aspect. And that is a valid objection in general, but it’s easier to get past it by asking this question: If you didn’t have to spend much mental energy repeatedly making daily decisions like wh...
Source: Steve Pavlina's Personal Development Blog - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Productivity Source Type: blogs