3 Things I Relearned About Decision Fatigue - Episode 187

 If you've ever stared at your to-do list and felt your brain was short-circuiting from the sheer number of choices, yeah, I've been there too. It's called decision fatigue, the mental exhaustion that comes from making too many choices in a short period of time. The more decisions you make throughout the day, big or small, the harder it becomes to make good ones.

Your brain, just like any muscle, gets tired after constant use. In the last few weeks, I was there. Constantly. 

I caught myself wasting way too much time deciding what to do next, second-guessing the choices that should have been simple, and mentally spinning my wheels on things that didn't even matter. If you're putting things off, making snap decisions you regret, or just feeling mentally wiped out by midday, this session is for you. Let's pull back the curtain together and get real about how decision fatigue hit me, what I did to turn it around, and look at how you can build your own toolkit to take back good decision control for yourself. 

This is the Budding Entrepreneur Podcast. 

Good day and welcome to the Budding Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Randy Bridges.

In each episode, we dive into practical business strategies that you can put to work in your business right away. We also focus on inspiring stories from leaders who are shaking and making things happen in their industry. It's all about giving you the tools and insights to take you and your business to the next level. 

So get comfortable and let's jump right in. All right, all right. We are on episode 187 of the Budding Entrepreneur Podcast.

Today is Friday, February 21st, 2025. And if you're feeling mentally fried from making too many decisions, I get it. Decision fatigue is one of the things that sneaks up on you.

It starts small, then suddenly you realize you're exhausted before lunch, because your brain has been running a mental obstacle course all morning. And the earlier you get up, the harder it can impact you. See, I was overthinking, delaying, and second guessing a lot of the decisions that I made. 

And it was costing me a lot of time, energy, and forward momentum. But then it hit me. I coach and teach people how to streamline their decisions all the time. 

So why wasn't I following my own advice? Why wasn't I getting the kind of results that I expected and knew I was capable of doing? So I decided to run a real world experiment and get my decision making back on track. I made a commitment. For one week, I was going to test decision making strategies that I swear by, but had gotten away from. 

So here's what we'll be covering in today's session. We're going to break into a quote from Tony Robbins, master of everything, self-improvement. We're going to talk about why decision fatigue was slowing me down.

The strategies I tested to streamline my own choices. The unexpected challenges I faced. And the adjustments I made as a result. 

And finally, we're going to cover how you can apply these lessons to your business right now. So let's set the tone with our quote of the week. Tony Robbins once said, your decisions determine your destiny. 

And honestly, that statement became very clear to me over the past week. In fact, the past couple of weeks, every major success and failure in my business came down to one thing, how well or how poorly I made decisions. The first thing I learned is simple. 

When decision making becomes exhausting, your business momentum slows to a crawl. And the more I hesitated, the more stuck I became. Before we get into some solutions, let's talk about that, about how I got away from my own advice. 

Now, honestly, I don't know when it happened and I'm not even sure why I did it completely. But at some point, I stopped following my own systems. I built very clear decision making structures. 

But as my business grew and changed, I let go of those habits. Why? Well, number one, I didn't necessarily think I needed them anymore. I figured I've been doing this long enough I can handle decisions on the fly. 

Spoiler, I was wrong. Number two, I got too busy. And the irony is the busier I got, the less structure I had time for. 

And in reality, I needed more structure, not less. And number three, I told myself I was being flexible. But in reality, I was just reacting to everything instead of controlling my workflow. 

Now the result, okay, I wasted hours every week making a lot of low level decisions. And I second guessed myself constantly. I hesitated on key opportunities, because basically my brain was overloaded with minor details, and I knew something had to change. 

So I decided to run an experiment on myself. I brought back three decision making strategies and tested them in real time over the course of a week. So let's talk about the first one, returning to the Eisenhower matrix, the Eisenhower box, and why I left it behind. 

Now, normally this tool is simple. You draw four quadrants in a box, and you add these categories. In the top left, you put urgent and important, which is do it now.

In the top right, you put important but not urgent, and these are things you're going to schedule. Bottom left is urgent but not important, and these are things you're going to delegate. And in the bottom right, not urgent and not important, and these are things we're going to eliminate. 

Now I've used this before, but over time, I noticed it wasn't as effective for me, because it forced me to have a specific way of thinking that jumbled everything together. And because it wasn't as effective, I convinced myself I didn't need it anymore. Now keep in mind, I was still recommending it to other people. 

I even did a few podcasts about it recently, but I discovered that I'd moved on to other tools to replace it. Now I knew these tools were helping me, but I noticed that they took way longer to use, and they generally led me to simply checking the boxes without thinking about the mission behind the why of me using these tools. Plus, they kept me in a lot of what I call owner-operator thinking, which is too much day-to-day and not enough visionary thinking. 

Now we'll get more into the owner-operator thing in another podcast soon, but for now, consider using every tool in your entrepreneurial tool belt in a way that advances the job you need to do that day. So back to the experiment. To advance the visionary thinking, I decided to customize the Eisenhower Box for my actual daily workflow. 

Instead of trying to fit everything into a jumbled owner-operator system, I removed the operator mindset and focused on the primary parts of being a business owner. Now using the same four quadrant environment, I looked at quadrant one. Instead of urgent and important, I flipped it to revenue generating activities. 

Now these are the prime movers that require immediate action by me and only by me. Quadrant two, instead of important but not urgent, I changed it to process improvements. You see, systems and processes require deep thinking, and you often have to block that into a schedule, directing these into your own piece of the day.

Over in quadrant three, instead of urgent but not important, I changed it to client and prospecting inquiries, which can be handled by my assistant or my VA. That emphasized the delegating aspect of that particular quadrant. And finally in quadrant four, which was not urgent and not important, it became kill anything that doesn't align with your strategic goals.

The reason for making these kind of changes might be obvious and it might not. I mean, for a solopreneur, they may prioritize things differently than someone who's leading a team of 50. The requirements are going to be different, everything is going to change, and you know the key to this is to make your tools work for you, not force yourself into a rigid system. 

The beauty of the Eisenhower box is its adaptability, so tweak it as your business evolves and as required. Now let's look at the biggest win or wins that I got from doing this. It cut my decision making time in half by eliminating unnecessary choices, but more importantly to me, I could now easily move from owner to operator thinking and back on a daily basis. 

My tool that I use a lot now, and I recommend to go with it, is that you have one day off, you do one day focusing on visionary things, and the rest of the week you're doing the day-to-day things that you need to accomplish. And that can be some of these visionary items, but essentially visionary you're in planning mode, whereas day-to-day you're in active mode. Ultimately, we all make mistakes, but the lesson comes in whether we learn them in time to make a difference, and that's the way that it was with the Eisenhower box. 

Now the second part of the experiment, I re-implemented the two-minute rule, and this is a simple but powerful tool you can use to your advantage. Here's how it works. If a task takes less than two minutes, do it immediately. 

If it takes longer, decide what to do with it. Either schedule it, delegate it, or eliminate it. That may sound very familiar. 

That's because I made sure that the bulk of my decisions fell into both the two-minute rule and the Eisenhower box at the same time. And what that allowed me to do is stop carrying mental clutter throughout my day while still moving the most important things forward as I went. The third part of this experiment was what I call decision templates. 

This is not reinventing the wheel or anything like that, but you know the problem was that I found myself making the same decisions over and over, day to day, throughout the week. And the decision templates work like this. Step one, you identify repetitive decisions. 

These could be things involving hiring, marketing spend, client onboarding, even which meetings to attend. Step two is defining criteria for decision making. What makes something a yes, a no, or a wait and see. 

And step three is to document the process. You want to use checklists, decision trees, or even a simple if this then that kind of a guide for yourself. Great example of this was I was thinking about hiring a freelancer for a project that was coming up. 

Instead of debating myself, I used a decision template like this. Does the task generate revenue or save time? If yes, continue. Can my current team handle it efficiently? If no, continue. 

And will hiring now free me up for higher value work? If yes, hire the person. These kind of templates give you a lot of advantage, especially if you're doing the types of things over and over. And in this case, what I did differently is I built the templates from common choices. 

In addition to the freelancer, I focused on things like research for new podcast topics and batching my content creation so I could know what three-hour time block I do the most productive and enjoyable work throughout the week. Now for me, on number three, the biggest win was and I tracked this, I cut down my everyday decision fatigue by at least 50%. Easy way to tell that is at what point do you run out of steam? At what point do your decision making muscles become a little, I don't know, they're not tight, they're not right, and it just takes you longer to achieve things and get to that decision point. 

Now let's look at the actual results, what worked and what didn't. Well for me, the biggest win was the Eisenhower box. It worked better for me because again, I customized it to the visionary prospect and away from the operator. 

The biggest surprise for me was that the two-minute rule made the biggest difference with small repetitive decisions. It also worked well with revenue generating activities because I could batch a lot of small activities into a short time block making my focus very clear. Now what didn't work? Well at first it was the decision templates. 

Very quickly I discovered that everything I thought was a process needed tweaking. I had to create multiple versions before they felt natural, but it really helped to put my phone in view of the screen to record the visual and talk through the process as I was going through these repetitive tasks. And after doing these, I could quickly apply the framework and move forward. 

That also allowed me to hand quite a few of those decisions off to my VAs. I knew I could get at least 80% or better results while reclaiming my own time. As we said, I reduced about 50% of my decision fatigue in one week. 

Now obviously your mileage may vary, but personally I'm finding that I can maintain my focus on long view planning through strategic parts of the day and the week. So let's talk about how you can apply these lessons in your own life and your business. If you're overwhelmed with decisions, try this. 

Customize an Eisenhower box for yourself. Make it fit your workflow and priorities. In short, make it your own. 

Now I covered this information about the Eisenhower box in detail with episode 175. Use the two-minute rule. Stop letting minor decisions pile up. 

Handle them immediately or bash them into time blocks whenever is convenient. And create decision templates. Look at your reoccurring choices and build preset responses. 

Even if you only start with one of these, you'll see a major difference. This experiment thoroughly improved how I approach decision making, and I challenge you to try at least one of these strategies over the next week. Now speaking of next week, our episode's topic is built around revitalizing your team. 

Motivation strategies that work. Decision fatigue doesn't just affect you, it affects your team too. And a tired, unmotivated team slows your business down, and we all know that. 

So if you want to get more from your team while keeping morale high, don't miss our next session. That's it for this episode. I hope you picked up some valuable insights and maybe even sparked a few new ideas. 

If you want to keep the conversation going, or maybe even explore partnerships, don't hesitate to reach out. And hey, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share this with someone who needs to hear it. The steps you take today could be the start of something big tomorrow. 

For The Budding Entrepreneur, I wish you the best in your health, your wealth, your business, your family, everything about you. Take care, and we'll see you back here next week.