Episode 9: Let it Be Easy - Reducing Decision Fatigue

One thing I love is the concept of letting some things be easy. Have you ever thought about how maybe we make some things harder for ourselves unnecessarily? Like we are subscribing to some rules that maybe don’t need to be rules? One thing that comes to mind automatically is how it seems like my moms generation all fully believed that all laundry has to be separated by color. And we grew up with like stacks of laundry but you can’t wash your dark purple shirt because it’s a light colored load right now! Better wait!

And I know certain fabrics do bleed and if I get a brand new red item I don’t wash it with a bunch of white clothes, but for the most part, we have learned we can mix colors of clothing in the laundry machine and everything turns out fine. So maybe that was a rule that we didn’t really need to be strictly following for the most part.

Another rule that I personally think a lot of people subscribe to is that we have to keep every piece to a set. Like if my daughter gets a set of 6 pairs of socks and 5 are super cute and one has like an ugly kitty on it or something, I’m immediately putting that pair in the donate box. I just don’t think we need to keep a pair of socks we aren’t going to wear. Or for kids toys, if my son’s wooden train set comes with 50 wooden trees that he never sets up and they just make 50 extra pieces for us to clean up each time he dumps it out, I’m not keeping the wooden trees. Straight to the donate bin. I know that may sound ruthless and I don’t mean for it to be wasteful. Keep them if you want to. Maybe have a bin in the garage for “extra toy pieces” that you don’t feel like getting rid of but also don’t want to deal with each time your kids play with certain things.

Let it be easy. Unsubscribe from some rules that don’t work for you.

So how can we apply this concept to other areas of our lives and let things be easy? I love thinking about this kind of thing. We’ll explore some ideas for this throughout this podcast and some here on this episode.

Along these lines, Have you ever heard the term “decision fatigue?”

Decision fatigue is basically making decisions all day long to the point that your brain is fatigued by it. To the point of becoming less-able to make decisions as you go. You either freeze up and become unable or unwilling to make decisions or you are making poor decisions. You may feel like you’re fighting fires all day mentally. You aren’t reserving your brain space and decision making for things that actually need your attention and best decision-making ability.

 So how do we combat decision fatigue? One way is to create a baseline of habits and automation. We automate things that we do each day, and reduce the mental space required to complete the tasks. We create routines, rhythms, systems, to support the lives we want to live. It’s essentially pre-deciding something that you are going to have to decide at some point, but you can decide ahead of time before it becomes urgent.

You know when you’re in your car driving to work or your kids school or some place you go very regularly. You aren’t constantly reading each street sign as you go by, wondering when you need to put on your blinker. You can probably think about other things as you drive and you’re able to get there easily because it’s part of your routine, it’s partially automatic.

It’s muscle memory. You may have a recipe your family loves that you make once a week. Maybe you don’t have to measure the olive oil anymore, you can eyeball it. You have this ingrained in your muscle memory, it’s automatic for you.

This is also why having less choices or options makes it easier to make decisions. If you go to the mall to go shopping and there’s a store where everything is nice and neat and spaced out and there are only a few options of each clothing item, you are actually more likely to find something you want there and enjoy shopping there. But imagine those stores where there are hundreds of items, all crammed together. Even if everything is way less expensive there. It takes a really good attitude to go sift through everything and find things you like. You have to combat the decision fatigue of sorting through all the things you don’t want. Not to mention the effect that clutter plays in our decision making, but that’s another topic for another day!

This is also sort of why a common approach to parenting toddlers is to give them 2 options. “It’s time to go to the car, do you want to hold your baby doll or your truck while we are in the car today?” That works better than, "Okay stop playing and go to the car." Giving limited options makes decision making easier and we feel good about the quick wins.

And when we are talking about intentionally setting up some habits, routines, automations, this doesn’t mean that we are setting ourselves into a hamster wheel and are trapped by our new routine… we are actually able to move more easily away from that and add to it because something about it is automatic. You’re automating the mundane, stressful, or repetitive parts of life so that your brain is freed up for the parts of life that are truly special.

So one example of this where people commonly use routines to make things go more smoothly is prepping the night before so that the morning goes smoothly. There are just a lot of variables in the morning, especially if you have kids. Kids are not always doing things exactly the way we had planned and life seems to go more smoothly if we have some margin to help them through the morning, and especially while remaining calm and collected. If our kid is having a rough time emotionally for some reason, but we haven’t made our coffee or have any clue what to eat for breakfast and are still looking at our closet like we don’t like any of our clothes, we aren’t going to be able to react well for that kid or for ourselves. But, if we prepped a little the night before, have some habits and routines in place, we are more easily able to step off course and give that child a little extra attention while still being able to complete our morning tasks. Maybe you prep your coffee pot the night before and have a couple of breakfast items you know are always available because that’s something you decided a while ago to do. You edit your closet regularly and don’t hang up clothes you really don’t like and never wear. you can more quickly decide what to wear because your closet contains things you like to wear, even if that doesn’t mean it holds quite as MANY things. So when your kid is having a tough time, you are flexible, adaptable, and have already given yourself some margin to handle situations with more grace.

Another phrase and concept I love that fits here exactly is something I learned from the Lazy Genius Podcast hosted by Kendra Adachi. And if you like the simplicity and how-to parts of my blog and podcast, you should 100% follow her because she is the queen of this stuff. I linked her book The Lazy Genius Way in my Instagram stories the other day as one of my top 2 books about habits and efficiency. Kendra has a method of reducing decision fatigue which she calls = decide once. Basically, it means making a decision ahead of time, to reduce the decision fatigue as you go throughout your day. She says decide an automation on the things that feel stressful to you. Try to use fixed decisions to give yourself more margin in the areas that you can. And she also says “live in the season” so you can decide once on some decision for this season, and for as long as it feels like it’s working. And then when it feels like something isn’t working anymore, you stop doing that thing.

Doesn’t this sound great? I hope there are other nerdy people listening who love this kind of thing like I do. Or at least I hope that you’re intrigued to see if you can apply this to your life.

That’s just one example but I hope that gets the point across.

Next time you’re frustrated with a chore around the house, ask yourself, could I let this be easier somehow? And see what you come up with. Are you adding in unnecessary steps? Is there something about that chore you could automate or decide ahead of time?

This is not an episode on decluttering but I will say a lot of times the answer to a frustrating chore is to have less stuff in the way. If you have to sift through a pile of 23 old ratty towels to find the only 3 towels you like and use, could you maybe just get rid of all those towels you will never reach for? It’s easier to do the laundry when the only things in that cabinet are the laundry soap and stain removers you currently use. And as I mentioned already, I think it’s easier to focus and make decisions when we aren’t surrounded by so many physical items, especially if looking at those items gives us a mental to-do list, I need to clean that out, those shelves are dusty, I still haven’t returned my friends dress, stuff like that. Clearing out physical clutter DOES help with the mental clutter too.

I hesitate to even say the words meal prep because I admit I am not qualified to give advice in the kitchen. But one thing I heard The Lazy Genius say once is, meal prepping is deciding what you’re going to eat ahead of time. If you don’t meal prep, you still have to decide what to eat. You’re just deciding at the last minute instead of ahead of time. As soon as I heard that I was like, okay maybe I can do that. I’m starting with breakfast. I already have a couple of options for the kids that we always have in the pantry or fridge. Since this is a podcast for moms, well it’s for anyone, but I have specially called out moms, I’ll share some examples because that helps me to have specific examples of what other moms do. I almost always have Kodiak waffles, Costco peanut butter, and Costco maple syrup in our fridge for breakfast. I almost always have the Veggies Made Great frozen chocolate zucchini muffins. I almost always have Stonyfield kid’s yogurt tubes which we keep in the freezer. We almost always have eggs and Costco kielbasa sausages. SO, each day, I’m not thinking- what should I make for breakfast? I’m not really trying new things here in this season. I just know I have those go-to things and 99% of the time, those are the only options. And if I happen to purchase something at the store for a different breakfast, great, I am doing that for a couple of days. But the baseline automation is there and I don’t really have to reinvent the wheel each week. It also seems like breakfast lends itself well to repetition. It seems like we would be more likely to get sick of eating the same 4 dinners all the time but for breakfast it doesn’t bother us as much, at least for my family.

Another way I have simplified in the kitchen is to mostly just use one cookbook. I love The Defined Dish by Alex Snodgrass. In my opinion, her cookbook is full of the healthiest, heartiest, easiest, yummiest recipes. She somewhat reuses similar ingredients so once I’ve purchased a particular ingredient, those things turn up in other recipes. I own like 5 cookbooks including a family cookbook from each of our sides of the family. You can have whatever number works for you obviously. But if you have some cookbooks taking up precious space in your kitchen that you have literally never used, consider donating them to someone who might use them! Or take several to a used bookstore and sell them and then get one new one you’ve been wanting. For me it’s not only a matter of taking up space I want freed up in the kitchen, but it also reduces the decision fatigue when I reach for my go-to cookbook instead of looking at a stack of 20 cookbooks. Besides that cookbook, lately I have really only been adding in recipes that friends recommend personally to me, and things that my husband and I have made for years that don’t really need recipes. And as much as I love digital recipes and the internet in general… sometimes looking for recipes online is really daunting. I don’t want to sift through all the reviews, I don’t want to skip past all the ads, I have just decided it is just easier for me to streamline making dinner by using a real cookbook!

Another automation I have for myself is to prep my kitchen for the next morning, but I found out recently it works better for me if I do that BEFORE I put the kids to bed. I used to try to do it afterward, but I would be so exhausted by the time they were asleep that the last thing I wanted to do was scrub some dishes and prep my coffee. I switched this routine to RIGHT after dinner and it has worked so much better for me. I eat with my family, and then after dinner the kids play with my husband or watch TV or whatever and I use that independent play time to reset everything really quick, then we do bedtime, then the house is already at peace so I can enjoy that time. AND my morning and day start off more peacefully because I’m not waking up to a dirty kitchen. This is another example of changing a routine that is working, but could work better. We aren’t bound to the routines we choose. I decided I liked starting my morning out with the coffee prepped and the dishes put away, but trying to do that after putting the kids to bed felt stressful. So I thought- how can I make this easier? I realized I really wanted to be able to just sit down and rest after putting the kids to bed, so I moved up that prep time to before they went to bed, and it felt so much easier! So that’s my automation now. For this season. When it feels like that isn’t working anymore, I’ll change it! We aren’t stuck to our routines, we just pre-decide what we can, for the season we are in.

Another thing I have pre-decided is that I am going to do grocery delivery or grocery pick up each week for my groceries. For this season. I have told myself I’m saving a few hours on a Sunday of grocery shopping and trading that out for play time with my kids. I have to plan ahead and set my grocery pick up to be ready at a time that’s convenient to pick up, but it’s the same amount of decision making as it would be in the store with 2 toddlers. I’m just deciding ahead of time and letting it be easier for me. I talk about this in Episode #7 but I received Instacart yearly subscription as a gift. It has been a huge blessing to me - automating this one part of my life.

Giving examples is sometimes tricky because everyone’s lives are so different. I hope my examples are helpful so you can see the concepts played out in a real life, but truthfully, these exact scenarios probably won’t be the best fit for your family. Only you can really create the best systems and routines for your family.

So take these thoughts with you through the next few days or weeks.

What can I let be easier? Are there rules I’m following unnecessarily? How can I automate part of that process? What are some decisions that I know I’m going to have to make later, that I could just make ahead of time?

What are things that happen regularly and you know you’re going to have to do. Getting groceries, getting the kids ready for school, getting yourself ready in the morning or getting ready for bed, preparing food, cleaning the house. Are any of these things particularly stressful to you? Is there something you can do that will make it easier?

In closing, I want to leave a few methods I’ve learned from Atomic Habits by James Clear. It’s for sure one of the best books I’ve ever read. It was the other one of 2 books on efficiency that I posted in my Instagram stories. I HIGHLY recommend it. I want to mention a couple of his tips. First. It is easier to stack a new habit on top of an old habit. So if there’s something new you want to implement, tie it to something you already do. You want to start prepping your coffee pot before you go to bed? What can you anchor it to? Maybe brushing your teeth. You already do that every night. So now you tell yourself, okay every night before I brush my teeth, I’m going to prep my coffee pot. That is easier than starting a bunch of new habits that don’t fit into your routine. Anchor or stack habits with things you already do.

The second point from James Clear is that 1% better is better. I used to have a much more all-or-nothing attitude before I read his book. He uses lots of good ways to explain situations where 1% difference each day makes all the difference in the world. It is worth doing if it’s a little bit better, even if you don’t see tremendous results right away. 1% better is better.

Until next time, let's Elevate Motherhood! Thanks for being here, friends!