Are you suffering from decision fatigue?

It might be the result of choice overload.

Have you ever gone to a restaurant and the menu was so big that you had difficulty deciding what you wanted to eat?

That’s when you end up giving up, saying, “I’ll just have the burger!”

Have you had the experience of trying to purchase a new laptop and been overwhelmed by the options and the number of decisions you’ve had to make? Everything from what brand and model to how much RAM you need to screen size, weight, color, and more.

Have you ever given up on a purchase because the process was too complex or took too long?

If any of these examples resonate with you, you’ve experienced choice overload. When you have too many options, it can become overwhelming, and that can lead to stress, anxiety and mental fatigue.

You fall victim to decision paralysis, or what I like to call analysis paralysis. With too many available options, you end up not making any decision at all, either because you are overwhelmed or because you over-analyze for fear of making the wrong choice.

When you use up your decision-making ability on inconsequential decisions, you may not have the mental or cognitive capacity to make the more important decisions that have a greater impact on your work and your life.

There are several ways you can combat this problem, as you’ll see below.

Fighting Decision Fatigue: Prioritize

Decision fatigue is the condition that occurs when we get overwhelmed, stressed, and anxious as a result of having to make too many decisions. And that can lead to a failure to make any decision at all.

So how can we overcome this problem?

In his book, The Purpose Driven Life, Rick Warren says, “You become effective by being selective,” and “Never confuse activity with productivity.”

Productivity expert Daniel Pink’s number one productivity tip is DO LESS.

If you’re falling victim to decision fatigue, you need to make fewer decisions. To make fewer decisions, you have to limit what you undertake in the first place.

Focus on the most important and most essential aspects of your work, those that have:

(1) an important purpose and

(2) a high value outcome.

If the task has BOTH an important purpose and a high value result, make it a priority.

When determining priority, consider your core goals and values. Think about what will benefit your firm and your clients in the long term, what adds the most to your bottom line, and what requires your personal participation or expertise.

Choose only a limited number of priorities at one time; I recommend no more than three.

Reduce Your Options to Diminish Decision Fatigue

Prioritizing and focusing on your highest-value tasks and initiatives can help you to do less and to reduce decision fatigue, but what if one of those high-value tasks or priorities still involves too many choices?

Simplify the decision by reducing the number of options you choose from.

Here are five ways to do that:

1. Limit your options by setting a budget. Decide in advance how much money you want to invest in that initiative. For example, if you are choosing new software for your practice, determine in advance how much you want to spend each month and limit your options to those that fit within your pre-determined budget.

• Set a deadline for making the decision. While at first glance this may seem to add to the stress of decision-making, setting a deadline can actually reduce stress. It forces you to make a decision and move on, instead of constantly re-evaluating or trying to explsore every single option that exists.

• Make a list of your must-haves. This is a bit like prioritizing, but on a more granular level. Determine what is non-negotiable. Using our software example, what features are the most important to you? What other programs must it integrate with? Eliminate any options that don’t include your must-haves.

• Eliminate options by category. This is a great way to reduce your options to make a choice easier when the category isn’t critical. A great example is our huge restaurant menu. Faced with an overwhelming number of options for dinner, you might decide to focus on just the chicken dishes, or only the soups and salads, to reduce your choices.
  
  Another example of a category could be a brand; for example, when choosing new devices for your firm, you might decide to stick with only Apple products.

• Use social proof to help you choose. This is what we do when we filter out results on Amazon to only the items rated four stars and above. If you’re trying to choose between a large number of options, filter them out by those that have the highest rating and only choose among those options.
  
  You can also do this by polling your colleagues who have made a similar decision in the past; ask which software programs other similarly-situated lawyers are using in their practices and if they like them; then only choose among the three most popular.