In an age when mental health is more readily recognized in the workplace and other spheres, decision fatigue has become something of a buzzword. However, its impact is more widely spread than some may realize.
What Is Decision Fatigue?
As you move through your day, you make hundreds of decisions. Some are as small as whether or not to take a sweater with you to work and others are as significant as ending a relationship. No matter what, your day will consist of decisions.
However, even the most minor choice can feel life-altering or exhausting for some people. Decision fatigue occurs when a person is too anxious or overwhelmed to make any decisions, or at least promptly.
Decision fatigue affects the body’s mental and emotional realms. Some choices are easy to make, but others are far more complex. By the end of the day, people can feel exhausted from all the decisions they had to make.
Who Experiences Decision Fatigue?
Decision fatigue can affect anyone who is feeling overwhelmed in their daily lives. Anyone from a businessperson to a college student can experience this type of burnout. In fact, it has been found that 24% of students are at risk of being dismissed from college or are considering leaving.
Although many students have reasons other than burnout for this, many are in this position because of decision fatigue. People in the workplace experience similar experiences and challenges.
Some people even feel the adverse effects of decision fatigue in their personal lives. Some become impulsive because they do not want to think about their decisions too much, while others become reclusive.
Decision Fatigue in the Workplace
Decision fatigue in personal life can lead to burnout and introversion. It might result in avoiding your friends and family because you don’t want to decide when to make plans or what to wear.
In your personal life, decision fatigue might be easier to explain away as your friends and family might understand and want the best for you. However, experiencing it in the workplace is more complex.
When you experience decision fatigue in the workplace, you might prefer not to let it affect your productivity. However, to effectively overcome this obstacle, you will need correct knowledge of your situation and significant support.
Someone suffering from decision fatigue might have trouble making important choices at work. This will lead to one of two coping techniques. Employees may decide in a reactive way, meaning some critical factors are overlooked, or delay the decision-making process. This will lead to further problems as it can affect your productivity.
Decision fatigue can ultimately cause productivity loss, which can lead to further issues like missing deadlines, mistakes in daily tasks and an overall decrease in efficiency. It can also affect how you relate to your colleagues.
A person suffering from decision fatigue might become agitated by conversation and be reclusive and irritable with co-workers. These emotional states will affect the two people involved and the entire team they work with.
Decision fatigue will lead to more significant issues if not dealt with. Initially, only the person experiencing it can deal with it— however, over time, it will require intervention from other parties.
How to Deal With Decision Fatigue at Work
If you’ve noticed decision fatigue creeping into your world and you’re looking to get ahead of it before it takes hold of your career progression, here are some ways you can deal with it:
- Speak to experts: Ask experts in your field for their opinions. Turning to others for advice when making decisions reduces the time you spend thinking about things and passes the baton on to someone else.
- Fill your stomach: It is difficult for anybody to make decisions on an empty stomach, and if you’re experiencing decision fatigue, it will be even harder. Ensure you’ve eaten before making big choices. It will help you think more clearly and decide more easily.
- Create batches: Tackling all your emails on a particular day or time and doing the same with your phone calls will give you more energy and mental space to make decisions later.
- Repeat tasks: Repeating tasks each day eliminates the number of decisions you need to make. For example, you can take the same route to work daily or only wear blue shirts on Wednesdays. Batching tasks has many benefits, like increasing productivity and focus and saving time.
- Schedule decision-making time: If you’re not good at making decisions early in the morning, it’s best to leave them for the afternoon. If you know that your 10 a.m. meeting takes up all your mental space, schedule decision-making time afterward.
The Way Forward
Decision fatigue is a condition that affects more people than you might realize, but the earlier you begin dealing with it, the less intervention you might need. Knowing what you require and how to apply it is the key to overcoming these challenges.
Enlist the help of those around you, find ways to cope that work for you and stand by your decisions once you have made them. Soon, you’ll notice how it becomes easier to make those once-debilitating choices.
