132. Decision Fatigue, a Behavioral Economics Foundations Episode

Welcome to episode 132 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy Today's Behavioral Economics Foundations episode is about decision fatigue. Ready? Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello. Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. This is the last episode of 2020. Like most everyone, I'm very excited to be putting this year in the rearview mirror. When thinking through the best topic for the last episode of the year, it was pretty clear that decision fatigue was a great one to go with. So many people felt bogged down by all the extra stress and decisions of 2021. We had our habits upended and were forced to think about things we were used to letting our subconscious brains handle for us. While I will talk a little about habits in the episode today, there have already been a few episodes on that topic on the show, which will all be linked for you in the show Notes. That includes episode 127, an interview with Wendy Wood, where we discussed her fantastic book, Good Habits, Bad Habits, which is linked for you in the show Notes as well. You can you will of course find those show notes within the app you're listening to or at the brainy business.com 132. There's also a free worksheet there for you to take notes on and combat decision fatigue. And for all you listeners who are already on the Brainy Business list, that worksheet is waiting for you in your inbox already, along with the email you get from me each Friday reducing decisions and clicks and things like that. If you're not yet on the list, simply download the freebie worksheet for this episode and you'll be automatically added. And that way you'll get all the new and most important stuff from the Brainy Business every single week without having to make additional decisions. All right, let's get right to decision fatigue. We humans make an incredible number of decisions each day. Even choosing to listen to this podcast right now was likely a slew of micro decisions. Let's say you're out on a walk. Why did you decide to walk right now? Did you choose to have some water or a bite of a protein bar before you left or will you have it when you come back? Did you decide to change your clothes or wear what you had on? Did you choose which shoes to wear? Which one did you put on first? Did you go out the garage or the front door? Did you lock the door or garage when you left? Did you tell or text someone to let them know you were heading out for a bit? Did you decide to start an app to track your steps while you were out? Did you grab your ID or wallet to bring with you? Which way did you turn when you left the house? Perhaps you decided to bring headphones and then choosing that you wanted a podcast instead of music. And then from your backlog of favorite shows, you chose the brainy business thank you by the way. And then potentially scrolled through all the content to select this as the one to listen to right now. It really is a lot when you stop to think about it. It's easy to think I'm going to go for a walk is a single decision. But all those little decisions during the day add up and can cause our brains to get tired. So how many decisions does the average adult make each day? According to researchers at Cornell, we all make about 35,000 decisions every single day. Yikes. That's so many decisions. No wonder we're tired. Some of those are big choices evaluated by your conscious brain, but many of them, well over 90%, as you know, if you're an avid listener of the show, are made by your subconscious. So what happens when we get fatigued? We may begin to make bad decisions or put things off for later and miss deadlines or stress over them, making it harder to make decisions again tomorrow. You may get trapped in the endless what do you want for dinner loop with a significant other, and it might feel easier to get into an argument over that small thing or getting annoyed and frustrated with them when it really is just because your brain is too fatigued from the other decisions you've made throughout the day and you inadvertently put yourself deeper in the emotional decision fatigue hole. And as you do begin to get fatigued, you're more likely to rely on your subconscious rules of thumb to make decisions. You'll be more cautious and make decisions that are risk averse without even noticing the change in your behavior. The quintessential study people reference for decision fatigue is of judges who were evaluating parole cases. An analysis of their decisions that was done after the fact found that time of day had the most impact by far on whether someone would be granted parole or not. Those in the morning and immediately after lunch had the best odds, as high as 85%, while those right before lunch or at the end of the day bad news their odds of being granted parole were basically zero. Did those judges do it on purpose? Did they even realize what was going on? Of course not. But this research can teach us all a lesson about ourselves, and it's one that we can apply in our businesses. I've linked to a few articles on decision fatigue in the show notes for everyone who wants to read up on it in more detail. In general, every article I found gave the same advice, so I'm going to share that quickly and get to my expanded insights later on in the episode, which you may not have heard elsewhere. The typical advice to combat decision fatigue, which is definitely good advice, is to limit the number of decisions you make. Make your big decisions in the morning and be aware of the time of day. Eat snacks, take breaks. Don't make big decisions late and put them off for tomorrow. When you on the number of decisions you make each day, the common comparison is to look at Steve Jobs or Barack Obama wearing the same outfit every day. Jobs always wore the black turtleneck. Obama only wore gray or blue suits. If you don't have to bog down your brain with mundane choices, you can free it up so it doesn't get fatigued as quickly. I personally care more about fashion than that. I'm not obsessed or anything, but I do like to mix things up. I would not be happy buying 10 of the same shirts and slacks and calling it a life choice. So instead of trying to decide in the morning what to wear and wasting those valuable early morning best possible decision times, make your choices the night before. Lay out your clothes, accessories, choose your makeup and hairstyle, even do it all in advance to free up your mind in the morning. Wendy Wood, who I mentioned earlier, talked about creating a running habit and when you do that that you want to make the thing you're trying to have be a habit as easy as possible. That could mean sleeping in your running clothes or putting them out in advance on the side of your bed. You can also prep meals in advance and do all sorts of things to free up decision making capacity in the morning. Remember to think about the kids as well. Will they get showers or baths in the morning? What are they going to wear? Lay it out in advance when possible and whatever they need to get ready. You could put toothpaste on their toothbrushes in advance and talk about the schedule before everyone goes to bed. Look at the next day before you wrap this one up. I know for the first few times if you're already suffering from decision fatigue, this may feel like it's extra decisions piling onto today that you just can't take your bike Shedding time Discounting brain is going to want to wait until tomorrow or next week or next month to start this routine. Don't fall for it. Doing something today is the best way to make tomorrow easier. And if you're taking a break over the holidays, it's a great time to relax a little, unwind, make less work and kids school decisions so you have the capacity to start changing your nightly habits now in order to be fresh and ready to start the new year, right? And of course, if you're listening to this later on, the tips apply at any time. And you could do that over a weekend perhaps as well. Speaking of the holidays, if you celebrate a holiday, you may have been making lots of extra decisions over the last several weeks. Who to buy presents for and what to get them, how fast to ship it, what wrapping paper to get, when to wrap the gifts, how to replace holiday traditions that may be missed this year because of COVID Overstretched brains are rampant at the holidays even before 2020, and decision fatigue is a big culprit that can lead to the extra stress and tension and possible arguments within families. Use the judges as your guide here too. Don't have all the calls with family at the end of the day when you and they might be running on mental fumes. If you do need to have big conversations later in the day or buy gifts at night, make sure you've had a snack just before so you aren't depleted of your energy reserves. It's a bit late on this tip as the episode comes out on Christmas, but don't buy gifts at 2 o' clock in the morning when you're going to be making terrible decisions. There's a reason infomercials do well in the middle of the night. And before I wrap up talking about the holidays, it seems like a good time to mention that decision fatigue is is similar to overwhelm, but they are not the same thing. I've linked to the episode on the overwhelmed brain in the show notes, and while the two can have some of the same impacts on your behavior, they don't have to come from the same place. Your brain can get overwhelmed by more than just decisions, and not every decision in and of itself necessarily is overwhelming. It's important to note that if you're overwhelmed from holiday stress or elections or Covid or a million other things, it's it can make it so your decision making reserves are already smaller than you would like them to be, meaning you'll be depleted and relying on potentially bad rules of thumb way sooner than you would otherwise. I've linked to a book I've recently discovered called Essentialism the Disciplined Pursuit of less by Greg McCown in the show notes what I like about his approach is it's all about doing things that matter to you and not wasting effort on all the other stuff. We all could easily get sucked into decision filled nightmares if we let ourselves. Making choices for others and trying to be intentional about every single choice and every single moment for every single person around us. That will not serve you or anyone else well. As a true testament to the four year old girl we have here in the house, I have started using the phrase Elsa it in honor of Disney's hit movie Frozen as my way of telling my clients and myself to not worry about something that doesn't have to be a big issue. This really helps with getting over bike shedding tendencies as well. In case you aren't familiar, Elsa's main song from the original movie Frozen is called Let It Go. So when something has you in a tizzy and is using up more mental energy than needed, just Elsa it, let it go and move on. Yes, it can be easier said than done at first, but I promise you will get the hang of it and your less fatigued brain will thank you. You potentially know that every episode of the Brainy business and all my emails end with the words be thoughtful and that is a multifaceted statement. Yes, you should be more thoughtful about things than you may have been before finding this podcast and learning more about your brain and subconscious rules. It's important to stop and question things, to say why am I doing this? Or is that really true? But you need to do that on select things. You can't do it on everything. Your brain needs its subconscious rules of thumb for you to exist. Your brain would use up too much energy and you would actually die if your conscious had to take on more than it does now. So quite possibly my biggest tip for this episode and something you've heard me say on the show before, is to be thoughtful about the things you will be thoughtful about. There are lots of things that seem important in the moment that simply aren't. They may be bike shedding tactics or other habitual distractions from your brain. If you haven't yet listened to episode 123 on the dose Brain Chemicals, I highly recommend it and the one on Bike Shedding, both of which are linked for you in the show notes Dopamine is a chemical your brain likes. It forms lots of habits around getting more of it and dopamine goes hand in hand with anticipation. These questions of will it work out or will I have time or whatever are not serving you well in the long run. But there are hard habits to break because that anticipation is giving your short term brain the chemical it wants all that to say it may feel painful to change your habits and start implementing the tips in this episode to reduce your decision fatigue. Note I didn't say eliminate because you will hit that wall at some point. We all do. Just because it feels bad or painful doesn't mean it's wrong or that it isn't in your best interest to continue down the path. And it might just be your subconscious rebelling, also known as throwing a tantrum about not getting the dopamine it's used to that will subside. Take that painful moment as a good sign, celebrate it, and keep moving forward. All right, now that I've told you a little about what decision fatigue is, how it differs from overwhelm, the most common study people talk about related to it, and those most common tips, some of which I've already expanded on, I'm going to share even more of my expanded ideas on decision fatigue to help you really implement this in your own life and business. First, I want you to think about all the stuff you are asking current and potential customers to do in order to do business with you. Are there lots of extra and unnecessary questions you're asking on an initial form or application? Things that could be handled later or maybe eliminate it altogether? When someone goes to your website, are there tons of clicks and reading and opening of documents and things to do that could be getting them to that point of mental fatigue? If so, that's a bad thing for you because if it is a good decision for them to hire you or buy your product, and I'm guessing it is, they are now so drained by the time they would be getting to the buy something or do business with you phase that they might be more inclined to go with the safer option of waiting until later and they might never come back. This is why it's so important to put the extra thought into your customer experience journeys. You want to reduce that friction and make it as easy as possible to do business with you. When you can reduce the number of decisions you're asking someone to make, it will change your conversion rates for the better. Be thoughtful about that process and experience upfront. Really think about reducing the decision fatigue and overwhelm and you'll be amazed at the change it has when working with customers. This should also be implemented in your sales calls, emails, and other points in your processes. When Nikki Rauch was on the show, we talked about making it easy to do business with you. One of those tips includes how you get a time on the calendar. Nikki shared about how so many people approach this with what she calls the Go Fish method. Her example was when you call to schedule an appointment with your doctor and let's say the receptionist says, when would you like to come in? And you're now overwhelmed with possibilities, to which you say, I don't know, Thursday. And they say, I'm sorry, the doctor's booked Thursday. When else would you like to come in? So you fumble around a bit and say Tuesday and they let you know the doctors also booked that day. And it just goes back and forth in this game of Go Fish. It creates unnecessary decisions over and over, causing fatigue. That's a bad experience. You may not think you do this in your daily interactions with people, but you would be surprised how often people do this. I see it all the time. Let's say I asked you for a meeting. How do you respond? Do you say that sounds great? What works best for you? If you do, you're pushing the decision back on the other person and making it harder to do business with you. It probably feels like you're being kind and making it so you're showing how flexible you are and that you care about them. You may worry that it would feel pushy or like you're being too forceful by narrowing it down, but in reality you're making it easier for someone to make a choice, reducing decisions which they'll be happier about when you get back to them with some really small parameters to start with as a jumping off point. Instead of saying do you want to call me or should I call you? Or would you like me to send the invite or do you want to do it? Your zoom or mine? Is 45 minutes enough or do we need 60? An onslaught of decisions that can add up quickly and make this simple situation become a never ending email chain and a meeting that never actually happens. Instead, look at how you can combine that into one simple step. Whenever I'm trying to schedule meetings, let's say someone finds a time that's going to work on my calendar. I immediately proactively send an invite with a suggestion of who will call whom or I include my own zoom link and I pick a time span I think is appropriate and I send it along with an email that says something like to block the time on our calendars. I've gone ahead and scheduled the meeting with my Zoom and for 60 Minutes to be safe. If you prefer to speak over the phone, to use a different link, or to have a different duration, please let me know and I'll be happy to make the changes. 99 times out of 100 there are no changes people happily accept and we move on with about 10 less stressful decisions on our plates. And I've done this for years. I've never had anyone come back and be upset that I took that initiative. This tactic can be used with leads as well as employees or co workers, anyone that you're communicating with. Look for ways to reduce decisions and make it easier to work with you and help others to do the same. They will thank you, not always in an actual verbal or written response. Often they do, but not always. Know that you are making a difference in helping to reduce some stress in their life and yours, even if they can't consciously realize it. Decision fatigue is another reason batching content and tasks is so important. Instead of starting each week by saying, well, it's Monday, what am I going to blog about or post on social media or talk about on the podcast or put in the newsletter or whatever, when you set aside some time to plan out content in advance, you condense all those decisions into one. It's like a super simple brain hack that can give you all the power of 20 plus decisions for the price of one. I decided in September that I would be talking about decision fatigue in this episode, which, as I said, releases on Christmas Day. Not having to think about what to research and work on right now is a huge weight off my shoulders that helps me make the content as strong as possible. Instead of wasting precious time and decisions thinking about what to talk about, you can live that joy as well, batch like decisions together and save yourself oodles of time, decisions and stress down the road. Another closely related item to batching is delegating. Don't hold on to every little decision and choice on a project. Fight the urge to have things done perfectly in the way you would do them and free up your brain from making decisions that someone else could do. Whether you're an entrepreneur or working in an organization, there are things you're doing yourself that could be delegated. Handing off the right tasks can remove so much stress and unnecessary decision making from your plate. And it's so important. Start with the things you don't like to do, or aren't particularly good at, or constantly procrastinate on. Could someone else do them Better? Faster. How amazing would it be to walk in tomorrow and find out it's already done for you? What bigger, more important decisions could that free you up for that no one else can do? There will of course be lots of mundane decisions and tasks that you can't delegate away. For those ones that you need to do yourself, resist the urge to do them first thing in the morning. It may be tempting to go through and put a bunch of check marks in your done column, but they may be making it so you're going to be having worse decisions for the rest of the day or keeping you stuck in that decision fatigue trap, hitting that much sooner. Instead, hold those decisions for times when you're low on the mental capacity scale. Just before lunch or after, say 3pm That's a great time to do some of those more mundane tasks to get more leverage out of your decision making abilities. All right, we've made it to the last tip of the episode for overcoming and fighting decision fatigue. Take breaks. Yes, that can be as simple as taking a lunch break, but it also means taking weekends off, not being on your phone all night long, and constantly checking and responding to emails. Taking breaks every hour or so to stretch or go for a quick walk. If you can and you need it, consider a nap. Personally, I'm a big fan of naps and I do give myself the opportunity to lie down and come back to my work later when I need to. Sometimes even closing my eyes and fully relaxing for just 15 minutes can make a huge difference. And if you aren't someone who does well with naps, find other ways to relax and let your mind decompress. Meditate. Do some yoga, listen to music, lie down without the intent to fall asleep. Just remember that the goal is to let your brain unwind. You should not be on your phone, scrolling through social media or reading articles. Even those tasks are filled with all those micro decisions and will continue to deplete you. You want to find something that will let you recharge and reset when you sleep. Your brain is cleaning up neural connections and solving problems for you, which is awesome. Something similar can be achieved by letting your mind wander or maybe writing in a journal if that's your thing. As a vocalist, I love music and taking a break to either lean back in my chair with my eyes closed for a few moments or even lie on the floor of my office with the noise canceling headphones on and some of my favorite songs playing can do wonders for my mental state. You likely already know what works for you, so find a way to work it in and if you don't know, test out some of the things I've already recommended here or ask me on social media. You can find me everywhere as the Brainy biz for some of my other tips. Know that it isn't selfish or self indulgent in a bad way. It's actually beneficial to your overall decision making to take this time for yourself. It helps keep your brain clearer, your decisions stronger, your work better and more meaningful. Taking care of your brain is important and using the tips from this episode to reduce decision fatigue will really help you be more productive, less stressed and produce better work. Sounds good to me. As a reminder, the top tips from throughout the episode are two Reduce and eliminate unnecessary decisions. Batch your content delegate. Make it easy for others to work with you on your website, emails, phone calls everywhere. Fight the urge to do a bunch of little things first thing in the morning. Save those for your lull times of right before lunch or at the end of the day. Be thoughtful about what to be thoughtful about and where to devote your precious energy. Elsa everything else, let it go and be thankful you don't have to muck up your mind with it. And of course take breaks so your brain can recharge. Remember, these are summarized for you on the worksheet for this episode, which can be found along with the show notes at the brainy business.com 132. You'll also find links to all the great books I talked about in this episode like Wendy Woods, Good Habits, Bad Habits, Essentialism, Friction by Roger Dooley and Nikki Rauch's the Selling Staircase. You'll also find links to the past episodes on the Dose Brain Chemicals, Bike, Shedding Habits, the Overwhelmed Brain and more. As we close out 2020, I want to thank you again for being a listener of the brainy business. I appreciate you and it means a lot to me that you've tuned in, subscribed, shared, connected on social media and everything else during this year and the years before and the years to come. Happy holidays to you and yours and I look forward to having you back again in 2021. And just like that, episode 132 on decision fatigue is done. Next week in episode 133, we'll be doing a best of 2020 episode with all the top episodes and content of the year. It's going to be a lot of fun. You won't want to miss it until until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me and remember to be thoughtful.

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