The StoWicks Conversations
by
Carolyn and Seth Wicks
Today's Key Points:
- Willpower is a Battery
- Small Stuff Adds Up
- Eliminate Decisions
Carolyn: Have you ever been to the Cheesecake Factory? They hand you the menu (all 20 pages of it) and suddenly you're going back and forth between the burger, the pasta, the steak, maybe even a fourth option, stuck in a mild panic over a decision that shouldn't matter this much.
We'd usually chalk that up to being indecisive, or not disciplined enough to just pick something. But its more so your brain running out of gas.
Think of willpower like a battery, not a character trait. You start the day fully charged, and every decision, big or small, drains it a little more. By the time you're staring down page 14 of a menu at dinner time, you're not weak. You're just low on charge.
This week we're digging into why that happens, and what you can actually do about it.
Seth: What this all boils down to is something we've all hear of: decision fatigue. Now I will say, the exact mechanism for the causes of decision fatigue are still debated and being studied, but the effects are not. Like Carolyn's Cheesecake Factory example, something real is happening, that is not up for debate. Mental energy is being drained, and each one of you have felt it before.
Now the real reframe I want to talk about is that this is not a discipline problem, it's a resource problem. People sometimes feel like their failures are a moral problem. Missing the morning workout, binge-eating the ice cream in your freezer, yelling at your significant other: it can all feel like you have no self-control, and therefore are a bad person.
However, that simply isn't true, because if this is a resource problem, then it's predictable and also avoidable. When willpower runs out, it's not an attack on character anymore, it's that a finite resource was predictably depleted based on how the day was structure. So the question now becomes: how do we change the structure?
Carolyn: It's funny, you'd think decision fatigue shows up for the big things in your day, not the little ones. But that's exactly when it starts.
You wake up and you're getting ready for work. Do I wear the black pants or the blue? Do I feed the baby now, or wait until right when I leave since I'm breastfeeding? I have meetings at 8, 9, and 10am, but I need to pump every three hours, and I still have to drive in. So when do I pump, and for how long? I'm ten emails in and I haven't even left the house yet. It's a typical Tuesday, and this is all before 7am.
But every one of those tiny choices is pulling from the exact same tank you'll need later, for the hard conversation with a coworker, for choosing to grill chicken at home instead of hitting the drive-thru, for staying patient during bedtime instead of losing it over a crying baby.
By 3pm, you're not tired because your day was hard. You're tired because your day was long, both in decisions and hours.
Seth: The best way to combat decision fatigue? Remove as many decisions as possible. Some classic examples are influential individuals (Obama, Jobs, Huang) wearing simple and predictable attire, Bezos batching big decisions to mornings, or even default retirement enrollment.
None of these people solved decision fatigue by getting better at making decisions. The 35,000-decisions-a-day number gets thrown around a lot (nobody's fully sure where it came from), but the real point isn't the exact count. It's that most of those decisions are invisible, automatic, and completely unnecessary, and every one of them is draining the tank you'll need later for something that actually matters.
You don't beat decision fatigue with more willpower, that has and never will work. You beat it by removing as many decisions as possible, so that your brain has enough power for the big ones. So how do we do it?
Carolyn: If you know me, you know I like color, but not all the time. I don't wear a lot of prints; I tend to gravitate toward solids, blacks, and whites. I have several skirts in 3 colors (blue, black and tan) that I rotate for work. Multiple dresses in the same colors. The same two pairs of flats (tan and black) that go with everything. I need my mornings easy. No trying, no brainpower spent until I actually need it.
We eat the same breakfast every day (weekends excluded). Dinner is a rotation of high-protein meals I can make without looking at a recipe. When I get home at 6:30, I've only got a couple hours with Leto before bedtime, I want to spend that time with him, not standing in front of the fridge deciding what's for dinner.
So when a new decision pops up, I work hard to decide once, then repeat. It sounds boring, but it works. It's also exactly why, on weekends, I get to make a fun breakfast or try something new for dinner because I've saved up the energy for it.
This is how I decide what deserves my brainpower, and what doesn't. Find your version.
Seth: Carolyn's closet isn't really about clothes, and our fridge isn't really about dinner. It's about deciding what's worth our brainpower and what isn't, so that when the moment actually calls for it, we've got some juice left.
That's the whole game. Not fewer decisions, just better-placed ones. Don't take it so far that you're living on autopilot, that would be crazy! But you should stop spending your best energy on things that don't deserve it. You need your best self for the hard conversation, the consistent bedtime, the version of yourself you actually want to show up as. Less, in this case, really is more.
Carolyn: Pick one recurring decision this week, breakfast, work clothes, whatever, and decide it once. Then stop deciding it. See how much lighter the next day feels.
Seth: I'm actually curious what works for you. If you have your own version of the Steve Job's turtleneck, maybe it can help us. Send it over!
Both: Don't make reading our newsletter a decision. Just do it π
See you next week,
Carolyn & Seth
βThe StoWicks
Quote of the Week:
βThe ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.β
Hans Hofmann
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