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 what to eat, what to wear, or what type of activity to do each hour of your week, what else could you do with the extra decision-making capacity?

Mental energy is a limited resource. If you spend this resource making lots of small decisions, you’ll have less of this resource available for making bigger and more interesting decisions.

Have you heard of the concept of decision fatigue? When you must make many decisions throughout your day, your decision-making circuits eventually become fatigued. When decision fatigue builds up, you may notice that at the end of the day, it can feel challenging just to decide what to watch on Netflix. That shouldn’t be such a difficult decision, but it can feel like a form of real work when your mind is mush from making so many other decisions throughout the day.

Decision fatigue can be cumulative over many days as well, so after several days of making lots of little decisions, you may feel inclined to have a “veg out” day where you barely have to decide anything. This isn’t such a bad idea, as it allows your decision-making circuits to rest and repair.

When you pile up decision fatigue, your self-discipline goes down as well. As fatigue increases, you’re more likely to make poor choices. One part of your mind may wish to make wise and intelligent, health-affirming choices, but the part that does the actual deciding just wants to rest and has basically checked out from the process. When you experience this state, it feels like your self-discipline has gone offline for a while, which is pretty close to what’s actually happening.

The way to alleviate decision fatigue is to make fewer decisions. Use this resource wisely. Instead of squandering its capabilities on recurring decisions, try to make each type of decision less frequently.

Systematize your days and weeks

As a direct application of the above, a good way to make fewer decisions is by structuring your days and weeks in advance. Map out what types of activities you want to fit into each week, and decide once what general purpose type of week works for you.

You can always adapt your general plan to incorporate unique changes for each week. And even if your weeks look very different from each other, you can still pre-decide how you’ll spend various blocks of time.

You can do this mapping with any decent calendar software. I recommend using the weekly view, so you can see the overview of your whole week.

Alternatively you can use a spreadsheet, setting it up much like you would with a calendar.

You could do this mapping very loosely by breaking your days into several blocks, such as: early morning, late morning, early afternoon, late afternoon, and evening. The decide what type of activity you’ll assign to each block of time. With this approach you’d have 5 blocks per day, so that gives you 35 blocks to allocate for each week.

Alternatively you could structure your day in more granular segments like by hours. Using 30-minute blocks currently works well for me. Of course some activities may require multiple blocks.

The types of activities you might use to populate your recurring weekly calendar could include:

• Hygiene (shower, shave, dress, brush teeth, etc)
• Exercise, meditation, and other health-related activities
• Creative work (writing, designing, etc)
• Project work (marketing, launches, etc)
• General business or admin work
• Communication (emails, phone calls, video chats)
• Personal development (journaling, reading, courses, etc)
• Skills practice (speaking, filming, guitar, etc)
• Weekly review and planning
• Housework (cleaning, laundry, repairs, maintenance)
• Naps and other breaks
• Meals
• Errands and shopping
• Entertainment or leisure
• Social time (date nights, time with friends, meetups, etc)
• Sleep
• Free time

Note the last item on this list. I think it’s wise to have some pre-scheduled free time that you can use at your discretion. You’ll be able to make better use of this time if you aren’t so overloaded with micro-decisions all throughout your day. Then it’s actually nice to look forward to some free time where you have the option to choose your activities. This free time will feel ever freer when you’ve adequately pre-decided when to handle all your must-dos and should-dos, and you can use your free time to enjoy some of your nice-to-dos.

When you get used to flowing with a weekly structure, it tends to feel freeing and less stressful. When you’ve intelligently pre-decided how to fit in the important stuff each week, you can relax and trust that you’ll get to everything that matters over the course of the week.

Even attempting to create a weekly structure can show you when you’re overloaded, and you need to scale back some commitments. When I first started using this approach, I caught myself designing 12-hour workdays to squeeze in everything I thought was important, and I soon realized that wasn’t very sustainable for me. So I re-thought what’s really important, and I scaled that back. I also learned to work with different quarterly priorities, so I can create a different type of balance across the quarter and across the whole year, which frees me from feeling that I need to address every type of activity each week.

Remember that the structure is meant to empower you, not handcuff you. You can always consciously break from it when you choose to. It’s there for you to slide back into it as your default approach when you’d rather get into the flow of doing and spend less time deciding.

One of the most empowering benefits of following some kind of pre-decided weekly flow is that you have more mental processing power for thinking bigger. You can take on those kinds of projects that you’ve always wanted to do but never had time for. It feels really good to be finally completing some of those major projects that I’ve had on my creative bucket list for years, such as publishing a major deep dive course on Subjective Reality, or leading people through a transformational deep dive course on character sculpting.

Even blogging this series was an exercise in reducing mental effort since I pre-decided the theme for a week’s worth of blog posts, so that was one less decision to make each day for a while.

This concludes our series on reducing mental effort. I hope you enjoyed it!

Our series on reducing mental effort continues.

Do less

One often overlooked way to reduce mental effort is simply to do less. Pull back from obligations. Decline invitations. Withdraw from projects till your plate is less full.

Working with a very full plate can be stimulating, but it’s best as a short-term condition. In the long run, it’s great to have excess capacity, especially for developing fresh creative ideas, investing in some long-term projects that will never be urgent, and rejuvenating yourself.

When everything on your plate becomes a have-to, especially when there’s constant urgency involved, you never get around to those important but never urgent items that could make a real difference in your life. Yet those are the projects that often grant the greatest feelings of satisfaction.

Remember the high cost of saying yes. You can only fit so much into your life, so make each yes as high-value as you can. A good standard here is to ask whether a yes is closer to a “hell yes” or a “mostly yes.” If you fill your plate with the latter, you may not have the capacity to accept or even to recognize when a true “hell yes” comes along.

Consider that one really good “hell yes” opportunity can produce greater results than lots of “mostly yes” obligations combined. Saving some capacity for the occasional “hell yes” could save you a lot more mental effort in the long run.

Make planning time sacred

Doing even a modest amount of planning for your weeks and days can save you a lot of effort later. Whatever you invest in planning, you’ll usually make up for many times over in saved execution time.

When we get overly busy, planning is often one of the first activities we cut because planning doesn’t immediately appear to more workflow forward. However, to reduce mental effort, it’s important to do the opposite. When the time crunch is coming up, carving time out for some sensible planning can make a big difference.

Sometimes when I feel exceedingly busy, I pause for a few minutes to sketch out a simple plan for how to achieve what I’d like to achieve. Often this involves deciding which aspects are truly important and need to be done soon versus those aspects that could wait or be cut.

A tip I learned from Brian Tracy is to occasionally pause and ask two questions:

• What am I trying to do?
• How am I trying to do it?

If all you do is ask and answer those two questions, you have the basics of a simple planning approach.

Ideally it’s wise to make planning a long-term habit. Many people map out their days the night before, which is a good start.

As Stephen Covey noted in the book First Things First, weekly rhythms are usually the best for routine planning because a week is a long enough time frame to address most (or all) of your important roles. You can’t necessarily give much attention to every important role in a single day though.

Do your best to treat planning time as sacred, even when you’re tempted to skip it or cut it. You may carve out an hour or two on a weekend to plan your week as many people do. I often like to begin the week with a planning session on Monday morning because that’s a time when I’m freshest mentally and emotionally, after I’ve taken some restoration time over the weekend and let go of the previous week.

Decide first; then do

A simple but powerful habit for smooth workflow is to separate deciding from doing.

Work in two phases. First, take some time to decide what you need to do and how you’re going to do it. Write down your action steps in order, and make them pretty granular. Don’t worry about doing any of the steps yet. Just figure out what they are, and write them down in order.

I use a daily work journal for this, which is just a basic spiral notebook. Each day, often multiple times per day, I make short lists of the action steps for whatever I need to do next. This usually takes a few minutes.

Sometimes I may list only enough steps to carry through the next 30 minutes. Other times I may list a few hours worth of steps. And sometimes I may list enough action steps to last 2-3 days.

You may wonder if it’s enough to have a typed to-do list on one of your devices. I think that’s fine, but I still recommend writing down the action steps with pen and paper as part of your daily flow, even if you’re just copying them directly from a screen. I’ve experimented with this a lot, and for some reason I find that handwriting the action steps and crossing them off as I do them is way more satisfying than checking off or deleting items on a screen-based list. I also find that writing the steps makes me feel more committed to doing them. The handwritten list feels more personal and makes me feel like I own it. A screen-based list feels a bit more distant. A handwritten list on a screen (like with an Apple Pencil) still doesn’t quite feel as good as simple pen and paper. I suggest you do your own experimenting here to discover what gives you the best feelings of commitment, progress, and flow.

Once you have your steps listed, you can focus on doing. There’s no need to occupy part of your brain with figuring out what needs to be done once you’ve already made those decisions. You can just do one step at a time, checking each one off as you complete it.

You may even gain a small sense of accomplishment just from creating the to-do list – a boost which can help you flow into the action phase with a little more motivation.

Mixing deciding and doing tends to be less efficient than separating these phases. The mind goes into different modes of thinking for each phase, so it can devote all its best resources to one type of thought.

What if you run into a snag in your doing phase, and you realize that your original action sequence won’t work? If you no longer have good cause to trust your existing list, go ahead and switch back to decision mode. You may be able to modify the remainder of your current list, or you may feel that it’s best to drop the old list and create a fresh one.

We’ll continue with Part 7 of this series tomorrow.