“We have too many choices, too many decisions,
too little time to do what is really important.”
Barry Schwartz
As a leader, you strive to make the best and most timely decisions possible for your organization. Yet this intention can be undermined by the sheer volume of decisions you face each day.
‘Decision fatigue’ describes the state of mental exhaustion that develops over the course of the day when making a high volume of decisions. The result is that your brain’s executive functioning becomes impaired.
When faced with a decision, the brain’s cognitive resources are expended on evaluating options, weighing outcomes, and regulating impulses. The more decisions you face — especially when they are continuous and sequential — the more these resources are depleted.
The human brain makes over 30,000 decisions every single day. For leaders this includes normal daily decisions as well as high-stakes business decisions. Research conducted by Oracle found that leaders spend nearly 40% of their time each day on decisions. And up to 90% of business leaders suffer from decision fatigue or decision distress. No wonder that so many leaders are experiencing clinically high levels of stress, fatigue, and burnout.
You may be experiencing Decision Fatigue if you find yourself:
- Making hasty or impulsive decisions.
- Choosing the easiest or most familiar option instead of considering alternatives.
- Delaying or avoiding decisions.
- Feeling irritated, impatient, or emotionally overwhelmed by even minor routine decisions.
- Experiencing brain fog.
Perhaps the most significant hazard is this: The more decisions you have to make, the more the quality of those decisions deteriorates. In other words, more decisions can often mean worse decisions.
Fortunately, there are things you can do to manage your cognitive load:
- Limit daily minor decisions by establishing consistent routines, such as ‘decide once’ items and creating time blocks for specific activities.
- Prioritize important decisions and tackle the most critical or complex decisions early in the day when your cognitive energy is at its highest.
- Reduce the sheer volume of options for any decision by narrowing them down to a maximum of three to five viable options.
- Take frequent breaks to recharge your cognitive energy.
A final suggestion: Let go and delegate. Spread some decision-making across your team. That reduces your burden of making every decision, but also provides learning and leadership opportunities for others.
Real leadership isn’t making all the decisions. Real leadership is ensuring that the right decisions get made.
Success Authorities helps leaders break the cycle of decision fatigue and burnout with the Questions-to-Momentum™️ Flywheel – a structured path from questions to clarity, decisions, action, and sustained momentum.
