Four Tips For Overcoming Decision Fatigue

Hi there, I'm Ben Morton and welcome to another episode of the Leaders Kit Bag. It's the weekly micro edition of my podcast. Each episode is just six minutes long and is designed to provide you with tips, tools and tactics around specific aspects.

Of leadership and management.

It addresses some of the most common challenges you will face as a leader or manager. They are all recorded unscripted whilst I'm out walking in the countryside.

So you'll probably hear birds tweeting in.

The background or just ambient noise as the people around me are going about their day to day life. That's all I'm going to say by way of an introduction, so let's dive.

Straight in to this week's episode. I was recently reading a McKinsey study from 2019 that found just 20% of executives believe their organizations excel at decision making. And that same study suggested those that do receive on average a 20% higher return on their investments. That's why this next set of Leaders Kit Bag episodes is focused on your individual ability to make better decisions and that of your team and potentially entire organization. The first thing to understand is that in any given day we have got a limited amount of cognitive bandwidth or mental firepower. What this means in practice is that the more decisions we make during the day, the less effective we become at making them. It's called decision fatigue or ego depletion. One study involving nurses found that the longer they went without taking a break, the less effective their decisions were and the more expensive the clinical decisions were. Fascinating, right? So how do we go about using this new knowledge? Well, I've got four practical tips that you can take away and and employ right now. Number one, the first tip is to reduce the number of decisions that you make in any given day. Mark Zuckerberg, Matilda Kahl, Barack Obama, to name just a few, are all famous for wearing exactly the same or very similar outfits each day. Why? Because it reduces the number of decisions they need to make, thus saving or preserving their mental brain power for the big decisions that they need to make. This is exactly why you rarely see me wearing anything other than these blue T shirts, a blue polo shirt, or a smart blue shirt. The second tactic is to plan your decisions. If you have got big, important strategic decisions to make, plan them in to be made when you are fresh. That might be a different time of the day for different people, but plan those decisions when you know you are fresh and you have got the maximum mental firepower available to you. For example, for most of us, I would suggest we avoid making big important decisions towards the end of the day. The third tip is to delay your decision making. We often think that an attractive trait in leaders, or a trait that makes us successful is the ability to make very quick, instantaneous decisions. That's not necessarily the case. Our job as a leader is to make effective decisions, and quick decisions are rarely effective. So if you've got an important decision to make and you know your mental reserves are somewhat depleted, then delay the decision. There's a lot of truth in the adage, if you've got a problem, sleep on it. Sleeping on a decision, delaying a decision allows your default mode network a different brain region to process that challenge unconsciously for you. I've spoken about that in a previous episode of the Leaders Kit Bag. Finally, the fourth tip I've got for you around your individual ability to make great decisions is to delegate. Delegate as many decisions as you possibly can. The ones that don't need your expertise, experience or your approval. Get those off of your plate and allow other people to make those decisions. You can do this using process or tools like the decision tree that Susan Scott talks about in her brilliant book Fierce Conversations. So there you have it. Four practical tools to help you make much better, more effective decisions. And one final thing before you go. If you're getting value from these Leaders Kit Bag videos and podcasts, then I've got something incredibly exciting coming down the line for you later this year. It's called Ben in youn pocket. It's my AI clone that will give you instant access to my 20 plus years of experience, expertise, knowledge and insights at your fingertips and at the touch of a button. If you're interested to know more. If you want to get on the wait list and be one of the early adopters and get all sorts of benefits when it goes live, pop your details into the link that's in the notes wherever you're watching or listening to this and I'll keep you up to date as that unfolds. That's it for now, folks. As always, hope it's been useful. Look after yourself and look after those you've got the privilege and responsibility to lead. Until next time. Lead on.