5 Strategies to Automate Decisions, Boost Willpower, and Prevent Decision Fatigue

When unimportant decisions are automated, your resolve increases, and your ability to make decisions that will affect your life improves.

Imagine that you are at work when the phone rings. You were waiting for the call and did not know what the other person would say, but you knew that there would be a great opportunity—a chance in which there is some risk, but it may change your life, improve your career, and change your family circumstances—but there was a small possibility that things would get worse if you agreed.

The question is: “When is the best time of day to make this decision?” It may seem strange, because why is the timing so important? There  is a great opportunity and a slight risk; aren't you supposed to make the right decision regardless of the timing? According to research, timing will affect your answer.

In fact, we make various types of decisions daily, for example:

• When should I get out of bed?
• How much should I save for retirement?
• When should I feed the cat?
• Should I get married?
• And many, many others.

It is not difficult to answer these questions when each of them is separate, and there are even deeper questions that require more thinking than easy answers, but the situation is different when you meet together. If you ask yourself all these questions at the same time, you will exhaust yourself, and you will feel what the experts call "decision fatigue," which is the inability to make a smart and rational decision after having to make many decisions before.

If you are a leader, you will have a lot of decisions to make every day, and the way you make them will have a huge impact not only on your life but also on the lives of those around you. People depend on you to make good decisions, and it is very important that you make the best possible decisions on important topics. The bad news is that maybe you won’t do that, or at least you won’t succeed in doing it all the time, but the good news is that you can do something and quickly fix the problem.

So, in this article, we're going to talk about how you can improve your ability to make smart decisions about the most important life choices.

Diminished resolve

How do you decide whether someone should spend their life free or locked up in prison? It is unlikely that you will have to answer such a question, but judges must answer it several times a day. For example, if someone has made a mistake years ago and has spent some time in prison, the judge must decide whether it is appropriate to release him on parole or whether he should remain in prison.

The judge will consider several details, including:

• What is the crime?
• How long did the person spend in prison?
• How was his behavior during this time?
• What are psychologists' thoughts?

The judge collects all these factors and thinks carefully about them before making a decision. If the judge's morning is busy and he has not yet eaten his lunch, it is very likely that he will resort to the safe option and return the individual to prison.

Even judges, who are the highest authority in the administration of justice, fall victim to decision fatigue because they may lack the resolve to make the right decision under the wrong circumstances, just like the rest of us, all because our stock of resolve is limited.

It takes a lot of willpower to make good choices, and we don't have enough of it to make the right choices throughout the day. For most of us, there are a limited number of decisions that we can make correctly every day, so deciding which one to make today is crucial.

When you look at how we prioritize trivial things at the expense of important things, it's no wonder we make failed decisions all the time.

If you have an important future vision that requires a lot of willpower and focus, how will it work when a trivial issue like the color of the shirt you have to wear today gets as much attention as an important issue like launching a new program on the same day? It certainly won't work unless you're willing to make an effort now to make the process of making decisions easier.

5 Strategies for automating decisions

We have a lot of decisions to make every day, and we don't have a lot of energy to make them. Moreover, our brains aren't very good at prioritizing quickly, so you should be careful to focus your attention on important decisions and not drain your resolve to make unimportant choices.

The easiest solution is to make important decisions in the morning, but it is not always an effective solution. There are many unimportant decisions that you have to make every morning, from the color of your clothes to your breakfast, before it is time for the important things.

But you do not always know when you will face a decisive decision or when the opportunity will knock on your door. The other downside is that this solution does not address the problem of many decisions and the limited determination to make them. You can make great decisions about some important things, but you will feel bad when you have difficulty with the rest of them.

The best solution is automation. This way, you can do it without the need for determination to make your own unimportant decisions, or it can be predicted by building systems that look for evidence and make the best decision automatically.

If something happens, you behave in a certain way. However, "automating your decisions" is difficult. The easiest way to do this is to look at some examples and try to follow them.

Here are five examples you can use to start automating your decisions every day:

1. Follow a routine in the morning

When you wake up in the morning, do you know exactly what you're going to do next and always do it? Or do you spend time thinking, then do something different every day? You won't realize it at the moment, but this hesitancy in decision-making consumes your resolve.

Instead, establish a sequential routine for your day, for example, when you wake up at 6 a.m., exercise, have breakfast, shower, get dressed, then go to work. So almost every decision you can make before you start work in the morning will be ready and you don't need to make any effort for it. You can use the resolve you've saved on something important later in the day.

2. Create an automation system for the daily to-do list

Everyone obsessed with productivity knows the importance of the daily task list, and there are many rules for that, including:

1. Accomplish important tasks first.
2. Reduce your expectations of the number of tasks you can accomplish per day.
3. Identify small, actionable tasks.

The rules are great, but do you notice how you end up writing the same tasks every day and having the same conversation with yourself about what to do first? All this thinking requires energy.

There are routine tasks in your life that you do not need to think about every day; instead, create an automation system so that you only have to think about them once and then implement them directly.

There are things that will need to be done every day, and they cannot be on this list. They will not be a problem because you will have a lot of determination to make good decisions about tasks that are not part of the automation system.

3. Make selecting clothing easier

Except for some special occasions, your wardrobe doesn't need to contain more than you need to; it's good to enjoy the diversity. But this is a great example from your life that shows how small decisions get out of hand, and you run out of steam early in the morning.

This doesn't leave enough stock for the most important things you'll encounter later on. So if you think the 10 minutes you spend staring in the mirror and choosing the right clothes don't affect the bigger decisions, you're wrong.

So instead of doing it every day, just do it when you buy clothes once a year, buy clothes that fit with everything else you already own, have your wardrobe be flexible—you can wear anything with anything else—and use the time you spend choosing clothes to think about more important things.

4. Make choosing meals simpler

It's bad to postpone thinking about food until you're hungry, because then you tend to make bad choices that hurt your health and drain your resolve. So instead, you can narrow down your breakfast choices by creating a menu that identifies the breakfast you'll be eating every day, so you'll save time and have a healthy system at the same time.

5. Schedule your social interactions

It's helpful to set days and times to go out with your friends or family every week, so you don't need to worry or spend too much time thinking about answering when you get a surprise invitation.

You can work through the day and make time for your friends and other colleagues, and this also increases the time allocated for them because you won't waste time worrying about how to respond to invitations. If the event is during “work  hours,” you can always answer, “It sounds so fun, but I can't come. Can we postpone it to another time instead?”

Be careful not to make too many appointments at any given time if social interactions are overwhelming you; these rules of social automation ensure a balance between your work and your social relationships.

In conclusion

There are a lot of decisions you have to make, and you don't have the resolve to avoid decision fatigue. So if you want to focus on your most important work and be a successful leader for the people who depend on you, you need a system to automate things that are not important and that are predictable.

These are a few parts of your life that you can automate every day to increase your happiness and productivity. You can't apply all these strategies today, but you can apply at least one, so choose the strategy that looks easier and test it for a week.