#10 Save 245,000 Decisions Per Week with This Simple Habit (Decision Diet 101)

TRANSCRIPT

Robyn: One of the number one reasons people come to me and work with me is because they are just so tired, and they're tired of being tired. They are craving more time freedom to go from time poor, time starved, to time saved, but also to just feel vibrant again, to have energy, to not feel so depleted at the end of every single day.

It's one of the reasons I wrote my first book, The Feel Good Effect. And in that book, I came up with a simple formula that I call the fatigue formula. So the fatigue formula is made up of two parts. The first part is task switching. So the number of times we switch our attention from thing to thing to thing during the day. That's not what this particular episode is about, but we'll probably come back to that later. later. And the second is decision fatigue or the sheer preposterous number of decisions that we have to make in the day, the mental load of the constant needing to decide on everything from what to eat to what to work on to scheduling doctor's appointments. And these two things together, task switching plus decision fatigue equals depletion. but I probably don't have to tell you that. Imagine that you have a battery, like the battery on your phone, and these two things, switching all day long, and deciding, deciding, deciding, is pulling on that battery.

Just like if you have one of those really heavy abs that trains your battery really quickly, imagine that these two things, task switching and decision fatigue are just huge strains. And at the end of the day, the day, that battery is in that red line, it's almost on zero. And I'm not going to tell you that this is the only thing that's causing exhaustion and you being tired and tired of being tired, but I will say it is a big factor. And it just keeps getting more relentless every year that goes by. The more responsibilities you have, it just keeps piling on. Now don't worry. it's not all bad news, but I have to tell you that in the fatigue formula, when we get that mental drain, that leads to lower willpower and less energy. It explains a lot of why we might feel we have more willpower and "discipline" early in the day and why it flags by about 3 p .m.

It's also one of the culprits of that drain of energy, the absolute exhaust. by the end of the week. Again, not the only reason. I have a chronic health condition. There are other factors, but this is one that we actually have a little bit of control over. Don't believe me? Here is a staggering fact. We make about 35 ,000 decisions a day. That's 35 ,000 in just one day. Take that over a seven -day a week. that's two hundred and forty -five thousand decisions. I mean no wonder we're so tired.

Now I can't promise you that I can take all the decisions off your plate, but I can give you one simple strategy that could cut that number in half and just imagine how much time and mental energy you could save by going from two hundred and forty five thousand decisions per week to just a hundred and twenty thousand.
Hi, I'm Robin Conley Downs. I'm a health and happiness habits expert, and I'm here to help you simplify time so you can save time and make time for good. Welcome to Whole Life Organized.

By the end of this episode, you will have one simple strategy that will help you crush decision fatigue and have you going from 245,000 decisions per week to maybe just 120,000.

Okay, when I set out to write my first book, "The Feel Good Effect," I wanted to do a couple of things. First, I wanted to simplify the science of health and happiness habits because I think we've really overcomplicated it.

We've gotten into the weeds, we have people giving advice from people with really strong backgrounds and we've gotten into that. science to people who just have created a following on Instagram. We have so much conflicting advice, and a lot of it is more time -consuming and more effort based than is necessary. And to do this, yes, I drew on my background in the habits of science and in mindfulness and self -compassion. But also, I looked into my real life and-- also the lives of our clients. And we did surveys to really understand what are the barriers? What is keeping people from knowing what to do and actually doing it? And maybe you feel like that's you.

You kind of know what you quote unquote should be doing,
whether it's in work or health or happiness or life, but you're just having trouble getting it done. It's just good intentions, good goals, or general goals, but not finding that at the end of the day, the week, the month that you feel like you spent your time in a way that matters, that you feel good, that your habits are supportive of the health and happiness or lifestyle goals that you have. And what I've found is that people often blame themselves, like they're not working hard enough, they don't have willpower, they don't have discipline, when really the advice is failing you. It's too much, it's too time -consuming, it often conflicts, and it's not developed with your real life in mind. So that's what I was trying to do with the book. And in the process of writing the book and working with clients, we were able to kind of drill down or distill specific barriers or specific things that are happening in people's lives, that are actually keeping them from making forward progress, moving forward in their lives, feeling good at the end of the day. And it wasn't usually a lack of knowing what to do.

It was usually these other factors, the sort of invisible factors that they didn't know were there, that they didn't know how to fix, and also that they were blaming themselves for. I mean, I get it. I have absolutely been there. So it wasn't just about this general concept. It was so much about what I was going through in my own life. So in that book, The Feel Good Effect, which you can find-- pretty much anywhere, we broke down these barriers, the things that are really standing in the way of feeling good in life into the most simple, simple forms, not just saying, "Hey, here's what's going on," but here also is a fix. And one section of that book, one section in a few chapters is on this concept of decision fatigue.

And like I said, the fatigue formula, which I came up with, for that book, understanding and really looking at my own life and people that we work with, how often task switching and decisions are getting in the way of our energy and our ability to feel good, to feel energized in our ability to have like the discipline that we really think we should have. And I don't have any evidence scientifically for this, but I believe the decisions we need to make in a day are only increasing as the variety and the options and the demands of our time increase every single year. So while I've said before, I can't take everything off of your plate and I can't say,
let's all quit our jobs and take our kids out of school and move to an island. Because for the majority of us, that is absolutely not a realistic plan. Instead, I said, okay, let's look at these things.

Let's come up with a better way to go." When it comes to decision fatigue, I came up with one very simple strategy that has absolutely changed the game in my life and for so many of you as well. That has helped me go from making 35,000 decisions a day or whatever that exact number is for me. That's an average that came out of the research. I don't know my exact number, but I am imagining it's pretty close. That number is pretty close. higher if you are below the poverty line. If you have access challenges, if you have multiple family members that you're caring for, that just goes up from there. And I don't know about you, but that is way too many. That's so much for my brain to be doing, just to survive to get through the end of the day. We have to have a better way.

So yeah, I wanted a way to take that and drastically cut it to save myself time. I mean, I'm dying hours in the week. If we can take that number down by 20, 30, 40, 50 percent we're talking about saving hours and hours a week and days per month. When it comes to decision fatigue, we make 227 decisions on food alone. That is 1 ,589 per week and that's just on food. The thing about those decisions is that they are invisible. So, they're happening all the time at a microsecond. micro -second level. So you don't really necessarily realize that you're making them or how much of an exhausting factor it is having in your life.
In fact, just yesterday I was at the grocery store and I needed to pick up a few things I had forgotten. And I went to the egg section. And I don't know if you've been to the egg section of most grocery stores these days, but when did we get so many eggs out? types of eggs? There was brown eggs and white eggs. There was many different varieties of chicken care, like chickens that have outdoor access versus cage free versus, I don't know, other ways that they're categorizing humane access for chickens. There was antibiotic free. There was organic. There was vegetarian fed. There was Omega's added to the feed. And now this is not a commentary on which of those is the right kind of egg to eat. It's just my point is, there was a lot of decisions that I had to make just to get a dozen eggs, not just decisions, but weighing and benefits, looking at the actual price per egg versus the ethics of chickens. Am I willing to pay more for eggs if the chicken has outdoor access, or is it worth getting local eggs that aren't organic or non -local? -local eggs that are? And even if you strip out those more like privileged decisions, there's still the decision about how expensive are these eggs and is it worth driving to another store or going out of my way?

Do I have the time to go out of my way to get eggs that are a little less expensive or buy them at this store when they are more expensive but maybe the other things in the store are less? This is not even taking into account the health benefits or lack thereof of eggs the cholesterol debate that has been going on since the 80s, should we be getting egg whites in a box for the protein? And look, I just spent a minute talking about eggs, and this was a split second moment in my entire day of all the things that I had to do that day, which is all the more reason why we need a strategy or a set of strategies to get this in hand so that it's not spiraling out. of control and just sucking our mental energy battery down to zero every single day.

And after looking at it and studying it, experimenting in my own life, I have come up with something I call a decision diet. Now if you're triggered by the word diet or you are traumatized by diet culture of the last several decades,
stay with me here. Because a diet is grounded inherently in restriction of some kind. kind, cutting things out and then just leaving a few things to remain.

And there's plenty of research on why dieting and restriction isn't really the most effective way to reach your weight loss goals. In this case, when we're trying to make fewer decisions in the day, restriction is the perfect place to start. And that's what a decision diet is. It is restricting or cutting. out as many decisions as possible by making the decision once, ahead of time, and then not making it again. I'm going to give you multiple examples of decision diet in real life. You can also check my book, The Feel Good Effect, for a deep dive and more examples. And of course, a decision diet isn't going to work in every single case, and we're not trying to optimize everything. So we're not trying to make all these decision diets in our life just for the sake of making them or we're putting them in when it makes sense.

When it's a decision that we're constantly making that's ongoing, that is depleting us of our mental energy and probably of our joy. And that is all a decision diet is,
is making a decision once, ahead of time, and then letting it be that way until you have to revisit it. So of course, it's an art and a science. science, like almost everything, but it's something that gives us enough structure as well as flexibility to move past the quagmire of decision fatigue and what that does to us in our lives.

I'll give you some examples of decision diets for movement or working out or fitness in my own life. So one of them is on Mondays, I do a walk and I don't do a formal workout. I know it's flying in the face of never miss a Monday because my decision diet says always miss a Monday. And I came to this using the 80 /20 rules to go back and listen to all of our 80 /20 podcast episodes in the archive of whole life organized podcasts.

But through asking that question, what works, what doesn't, what do I need to do more of and what do I need to do less of, and I noticed that my-- energy is almost always low on Monday. We typically do some kind of big outdoor or physical activity on the weekend, whether it's a big hike, a big walk, I'll go to a studio to do an hour -long workout class, which I don't always have time for in the week. So I'm usually pretty active over the weekend. And it's not surprising that when I looked back and asked what worked, what didn't, that trying to hit the ground running on my when I was already a little bit depleted didn't make sense. However, doing no movement, at least for me in my life, is never really a good option. Getting physical activity, movement, a walk, getting fresh air, a little bit of daylight on my face, which in the Pacific Northwest in the winter is not sun, okay? There's no sunlight on my face, but at least it's some kind of light. That's also part of my 80 /20. I feel so much better. Even though I'm feeling maybe a little sluggish Monday morning, it helps me feel more energized. It helps me be more focused, more productive, and just a happier person. So that one is on the list, decision diet, definitely doing a walk on Monday, and not doing a physical workout otherwise. So you could call it a rule, you could call it a decision diet, you could call it something else. else But I don't have decision fatigue about what to do with my body on Monday And so when I set up my planner for the week and I schedule up my time blocks and all of those things I know what I'm doing on Monday because I already decided It's the same thing for Fridays.

I typically have a more flexible work day on a Friday I try to front load my week with as much of my work as possible leaving Friday open for administrative tasks, new projects, or sometimes taking the day off. It'll depend. Honestly, we usually, I swear, have only four days of school a week on average. So usually that day is just a day where I'm in the mom role. But if I have a Friday that is available, I will do an hour -long workout class on that day. And I do my weekly schedule, planning, in my planner and on my calendar and I will register for the class ahead of time because I don't know about you but where I live, if you're not getting signed up for things a week ahead of time, you're not getting in. So all those decisions are happening at one time. What am I doing and when am I doing it? And it's literally getting plugged into my calendar.

So when I wake up in the morning on a weekday, I am not thinking about what am I doing today? And I... I want you to notice that I don't have a decision diet for exactly what I will do every single day and what that will be and when it will be.
That didn't work. It was not enough flexibility. But right now, Monday and Friday, I decided once, I decided ahead of time, and I will schedule those things once, and then they're done, and I just rinse and repeat every week until the time comes when that's not working anymore. anymore and I go back to the drawing board and figure it out again. I have a decision diet for strength training, so weight training. It's the same concept. I decide once and ahead of time what I'm going to do, when I'm going to do it, where I'm going to do it, what equipment I might need, and it's a little more work up front. But my goodness, let me tell you, I could either do that one time and then make a plan or I could do it every single time and that's exhausting and it's way, way harder to get habits to stick when there's that much friction to make the habit happen. And that's why we're even talking about this because as a healthy, happy habits expert, you can't make habits if it's too hard. You can't make habits if there's too much friction.

And if you're having to make dozens of habits, dozens of decisions every time you're trying to get some momentum around a behavior and action, turn it into a habit, it's not going to turn into a habit. I have so many decision diets when it comes to work and productivity and my actual workday. One example is actually like a crossover of fitness and work, which I already talked about I think in a previous episode. But it is when I have a batch of admin tasks that are just kind of laborious computer work, I call it my procrastination block, things I don't want to do. I will put those all together into one part of the day and then I'll pull out my walking pad, my under desk treadmill, I pop my desk up to stand, set the walking pad timer for 45 minutes and then I'll bust through all of those. and the decision was the decision diet was I Will I'm not going to scatter these around I'm going to put them in a block and then I will pick a time of day and then I'll pull out my treadmill and then I'll get them done.

I Think decision diets come in really clutch when we're talking about food. So as I mentioned 227 Decisions on food alone. I have a feeling like if you like that the traditional gender role split itself it's a lot more for one side than the other.
Certainly more if you have children. Certainly more if you're cooking or taking care of food for more than yourself, for sure. Certainly more if you are on a restrictive food budget.

But honestly, no matter who you are, you could benefit from a decision diet when it comes to food. So I know a lot of people get the egg when they hear the word meal plan. but meal plan is a decision diet. It's deciding once ahead of time what you're going to have. I like to take the ick out and go a step further. It's something I call capsule meal planning. You can find it all about it on my food website,
realfoodwholelife .com. And I do all my meal planning for the month in 20 minutes. If you want more on that, I'm happy to do an episode on it. And we actually have a free download. You can download the template, like a printable download. download planning template. So you can meal plan in 20 minutes for the entire month. You can get that on realfoodlife .com. You can just search for meal plan on the site and it'll come up and you'll get this step by step and then you can download the planner itself. We'll also put the link to that in the show notes. But the way I meal plan in 20 minutes for the whole month and decision diet, the entire dinner plan for the full month. month is by capsule meal planning and it is by assigning a meal type to each night of the week. So Monday might be slow cooker night, Tuesday might be marinade night, some marinade a protein and have some veggies and a starch to go alongside. Wednesday could be pasta, Thursday stir -fry, and then Friday we order pizza and have homemade Caesar salad and when I say homemade I mean not really homemade like a bag of salad mix and a bottle of Caesar salad dressing and Then I leave Saturday night open for going out to eat or other people taking care of dinner and Sunday I'll usually do like a big batch of something so like a Sunday night dinner style that has enough leftovers for the week capsule meal plan decision diet allows for a lot of Variety people get really stuck on variety and I love love to talk about that on another episode.

I think when we say variety, we just mean dopamine hit. But, and there's nothing wrong with that. But I think our clinging to the idea that we need variety all the time is going to make it really difficult to get out from under decision fatigue.
Because if you want variety constantly in every area of your life with everything you're doing, you will not be able to get rid of. decision fatigue. It's an invitation to more and more and more decisions.

So we're restricting here our decision diet. We're restricting our decisions. We're making them once ahead of time by assigning a meal type to each night of the week. But there is variety because each week, like slow cooker night could be, I don't know, there's hundreds of options. So I like would probably restrict that even more or it may be too late. slow cook or chicken night. And then when you're plugging in a recipe, you've narrowed it way down. So you either use, I have like a fallback meal dinner idea list that I pull from. But if you're trying to find a recipe, you're not looking at the literal like 85 million recipes on the internet or your cookbooks, you know exactly what you're trying to trying to do. I do a decision diet for lunch and breakfast on weekdays. weekdays, including decision diet for my daughter's lunchbox.

And not only does this decision diet help me to have fewer decisions during the week by a long shot, but you know what it does to grocery shopping, it drastically simplifies it because we're not buying all these different ingredients that just end up on the shelf in wasting time, wasting money, wasting energy on ingredients that will never be. used again, but also you can end up with, and this is like next level, this is like courses and coaching, and I teach all of this, but you can really end up with a capsule grocery list where you are using the same grocery list every week and then making small modifications based on how you're mixing it up. We don't need to go there right now.

That, like I said, that's a 2 .0 or a 3 .0 version of this, but the basic idea is, is pick one to three breakfasts per week and one to three lunches per week. And that's what you're making and you're eating and you're buying groceries for. Some people are already decision dieting breakfast. My parents are so cute and they have, my dad does a yogurt bowl. He does the most over the top bougie yogurt bowl I've ever seen. It's yogurt. It's like plain old yogurt, Greek yogurt. And then he does all these berries, and then he does granola and a banana, and it's beautiful. Looks like it's from a restaurant. That's one day, and then the second day he does two eggs and a piece of toast. And so when they wake up in the morning, my mom will be like, "Is it egg day or is it yogurt day?" Then that way they, when my dad does the grocery shopping, which he does, he always gets very yogurt, granola. He has a very specific kind of granola that he likes. He'll bring it with him on vacation. And then he always makes sure he has eggs and toast. And if we go stay with them, I make sure when I'm at the store that we buy those things because if we eat his eggs or his berries, then he's not gonna have his decision to diet breakfast anymore. And they've been doing this for years. And he likes them, he likes eating those things. They are full of good food nutrition. They have all the macros and all that. So he's fine. Like he doesn't need more variety than that. You might just need one thing for breakfast every day. I personally find that I get bored with just one thing every single day forever.

I find that if I have one to three options for breakfast and for lunch, that's all I need. And then every quarter, honestly, I kind of re -visit. it. So I'll say, do I want to switch things up? Sometimes maybe the season changes. So I want something warm or cold. But the foundations of this concept for me, breakfast and lunch is pretty locked in.

For me, decision diet breakfast is always on the list is a green smoothie. I've been a green smoothie girl since before it was trendy. While it was trendy. Now it's not trendy anymore. And I'm still viewing it. You know, we have our protein in there. We have, I have greens, I have fat, I have carbs, I have everything I need, keeps me full. And I always have those ingredients on hand. I have them in a little basket,
and I don't have to think about it. And I do that like three or four days a week, even in the winter. I don't mind drinking a cold smoothie in the winter, which is why this is so personal. You have to personalize what you like, how do you want to feel? what's your 80 /20. My other breakfast is eggs with veggies and cottage cheese on the side or mixed in.

You can mix cottage cheese into your eggs if you don't like the texture and it kind of melts and you really can't detect it and that just bumps up the protein and then I'll do whatever veggies. So those are my two alternates and then on the weekend if we go out to breakfast or Andrew gets paid. like I'll totally do that pancakes we sometimes have. But during the week, I am not thinking about it. The decision has been made, the groceries are in hand, like I'm not wasting food, but I also have what I need and I'm not thinking about it.

Decision diet lunch, I also probably only need about two options. And I think it depends on who you are. Some people like having more, some people don't even need to. I will definitely do leftovers for lunch, but I know that for many of you, that's a challenge depending on if you live with other people. Like you might just not have leftovers if you have a lot of people or if your spouse gets priority on the leftovers, which mine does, because he works out of the house and I work at home. So it's only fair, I think, for him to take the leftovers. So like I said, it's either leftovers because that's always the easiest thing for me.

But if that's not an option, I have like one to three fallbacks. So lately, my fallbacks are chicken nugget salad, which is bare chicken nuggets heated up in the air fire over mixed greens and whatever veggies I have. And then I use one of my homemade dressings. I just make a homemade dressing on the weekend. You don't have to do that. I do it, so I have it. And that lunch comes together in five minutes. And I always have those nuggets addressing in some kind of greens to put it together.

And because I work from home, I'm able to air fry them. nuggets up. And that takes me, I would say eight minutes total to get that lunch ready. Second option is a good old wrap. It's turkey. It's girlsburg cheese, which I happen to like. It's mayo. It's mustard. It's a spicy, sweet jalapenos from Trader Joe's and spinach. I think we've forgotten about wraps and sandwiches. Not everybody. Lots of people still remember about them. I think they were demonized for a while. while by the wellness community, but like we can eat sandwiches. We can eat wraps. It's all good. And so I always have the turkey, the cheese, the mustard, the mayo, the jalapenos, the wrap, and the spinach in the fridge. So that one's a no -brainer. And then my third lately, which takes a little bit longer. So I can't say it's really in the mix is chickpea, pasta, mac and cheese. So it's bonza. like the Bonza brand mac and cheese. And I like that over, you know, regular mac and cheese because it has so much more protein and fiber, which is something I'm looking to prioritize in like the simplest way possible. And I will put frozen peas after it's cooked frozen peas, again, more fiber, more protein. And then if I'm feeling wild, I'll put a drained can of tuna, which is like a tuna casserole. So people will hate that. believe it or not. There is polarizing. So you either hear that and you think that is a lovely idea and or you think it's absolutely disgusting.

I don't really need you to like it because you don't have to do it. I like it because it's high protein, high fiber. I like it. So that's the most valuable part here. And then it has some veggies in it. But it all goes together, right? It's all about 80 /20. What worked, what didn't. What do I want to do more? What do I want to do less? How do I want to feel, you know, around food? So you're thinking about this from your own perspective, from what works for you in your budget, in your time budget, in your life, and importantly, how I want to feel is also satisfied and nourished.

So I'm not going to eat something I don't like to eat. But I hope you can see one how this simplifies all the way backwards. So if we reverse engineer all the way back to the plan stage, which is so late in with decisions, this is simplifying my planning, my quote -unquote meal planning by a lot. It's simplifying my grocery shopping by an insane number of decisions and time.

It's simplifying the act of deciding what to eat because I've already decided. Lunch and dinner, I know what it is. I'm not wasting my brain power on that at all. Actually, I misspoke. misspoke. Breakfast and lunch, I already know what it is. Dinner, I likely already know what it is as well. And the thing about decision diets is you don't have to be responsible for all of this. You don't have to be the only one in your life or your family who's making all the decisions or who's making all the decision diets.

This is a great chance to share the responsibility with people who you live with so that they can come up with decision diets as well. I always want to be sensible. about that, that just because I'm saying I do something or giving an idea doesn't mean you have to be the responsible for it. There are lots of people in your life that can also take on the mental load of decisions.

It doesn't have to be all on you, but the idea of decision diet can be used by anyone, and it's definitely one that can and should be shared. So look, life, all of this, it's not easy. We are being asked to do a lot. I would argue more than is possible. I think it's an impossible list that we cannot possibly cross everything off of. But I also know that it's not too late for you. I know that health and happiness is within your reach through these very small shifts. I also know with some forward planning, with this doing a small amount of work ahead of time to save us a lot of work in time later is Really really worth it.

If you found this episode helpful if you like the idea of decision diet I invite you to share this episode with a friend sharing the podcast with someone else is one of the most helpful things you can Do to keep the show here and to let me know that you appreciate it The other thing of course is to leave a positive review so that other people can understand what we're doing here and know if it's for them. Like, who is a show for? Let them know. And thank you for those of you who have left a review. I see you and I appreciate you more than you know.

You can connect with me and tell me about your decision diets on Instagram @wholelifeorganized, which is the lifestyle side, or @realfoodwholeife, which is the time -saving recipe and food side.

So here's to reducing decision fatigue, finding our decision diets, and more mental energy in our day. Thanks so much for listening. And remember,
you've got time.