Decision Fatigue

I recently heard about this new concept: Decision Fatigue, a.k.a. Ego Depletion. According the the New York Times, John Tierney is the co-author, with the social psychologist Roy Baumeister, of the New York Times best-seller, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (Penguin Press, 2011). An excerpt, “Do You Suffer from Decision Fatigue?” ran in Times Magazine, it was reviewed in the Times by Steven Pinker, and named one of Amazon’s Best Books of 2011.

It offers a fascinating explanation to why we lag on our diets at the end of the day, feel burnt-out and crave sugar mid-afternoon, or why we might make poor decisions and feel overwhelmed if we’ve been asked to make too many decisions or we exercised great self-control. Hint: we have a finite amount of willpower to use everyday, and if we don’t choose our battles, learn to make the most of what energies we have, and/or learn to grow our willpower, we end up doing things we regret. 

I highly recommend you check this out. 



FOLLOW UP NOTE:


Someone sent me this email in regards to this blog post, and I wanted to share it with you since it's spot on:

"--While on the plane, I read a story by Michael Lewis about Barack Obama with whom he'd spent a good deal of time. One of the things they discussed was decision-making. Here's the paragraph from the article, on page 4:

This time he covered a lot more ground and was willing to talk about the mundane details of presidential existence. “You have to exercise,” he said, for instance. “Or at some point you’ll just break down.” You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.” The self-discipline he believes is required to do the job well comes at a high price. “You can’t wander around,” he said. “It’s much harder to be surprised. You don’t have those moments of serendipity. You don’t bump into a friend in a restaurant you haven’t seen in years. The loss of anonymity and the loss of surprise is an unnatural state. You adapt to it, but you don’t get used to it—at least I don’t.”

-- If you want to read the whole article, here's the link:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/10/michael-lewis-profile-barack-obama