Creative work involves making lots of complex decisions. Like how best to achieve a particular outcome, weighing creative choices, and processing a piece of feedback to move a project forward. These decisions are happening alongside the thousands of other choices, big and small, that we’re faced with every day.
It’s a recipe for decision fatigue, a psychological phenomenon where having to make a large number of decisions results in mental exhaustion and impaired judgment.
Unfortunately, you can’t just decide not to decide. And flipping a coin usually won’t cut it.
So how can you combat decision fatigue, safeguarding your productivity, your creativity, and (whatever is left of) your sanity?
The Cost of Decision Fatigue
The primary cost of decision fatigue is right there in the name. Each decision erodes our mental energy. If we’re faced with many decisions (particularly complex ones), that fatigue can interfere with cognitive functioning. It can manifest in ways that negatively impact productivity, including exhaustion, brain fog, and unhealthy procrastination.
It impacts the quality of our decisions and our ability to think creatively, as our brains seek shortcuts to make the choice in front of us less taxing. As a result, we become more impulsive, illogical, and prone to falling back into familiar (and often biased) thought patterns.
The greater the cognitive load, the more likely it is to interfere with creative thinking.
Decision fatigue is also bad news for our wellbeing. It will inevitably lead to overwhelm, heightened anxiety, and irritability. And you know, burnout.
How to Minimize Decision Fatigue
Here are some solutions for decision fatigue that you can explore as an individual and for your team as a whole.
Evaluate Decision Impact
Before you dive into making a decision, think about the potential impact it will have and how the value of its outcome stacks up against your other priorities. Decide how much time and energy to invest accordingly, whether for yourself or your team.
Delegate (To the Best Person)
A key part of the evaluation process should be asking whether you’re the right or best person to be making this decision.
Could you delegate the decision to someone with more relevant expertise? Or even if they don’t have your expertise, could they devote more time to throw at the challenge? Don’t think of this as passing the buck – you’re ensuring a better outcome by transferring the decision to someone who’s better placed to make it well.
It’s essential to delegate effectively. Make sure you set out the context and desired outcomes, as well as directing them towards the resources they may need.
Learn Your Decision-Making Style
A critical way to reduce decision fatigue is to understand how you naturally approach decisions. Knowing this will mean you can consistently give yourself the resources and time you need to make them efficiently. Hopefully, you’ll also feel more confident about your choices, decreasing the likelihood of spending precious mental energy ruminating afterward.
You can begin by working out your decision-making style using a profiling tool like the “Decision Style Theory” (DST). This includes 4 main styles:
- Directive – You prefer a structured approach and focus on outcomes. You tend to go with your gut.
- Analytic – You take a less structured approach. You let yourself be led by the data and want to consider as many solutions as possible.
- Behavioural – You like structure but prefer to get input from other people by presenting them with a set of possibilities, rather than making the call in isolation.
- Conceptual – You prefer to work with people from the start and brainstorm lots of possible solutions together.
Knowing about the full range of styles will also enable you to adapt your approach to fit the particular decision or circumstances. For instance, if you need a team member’s input on a decision, borrowing from the “behavioral style” and presenting them with clear options could make it less fatiguing for them.
It could help to discuss styles as a team so that everyone is aware of everyone else’s preferences. That increased understanding could help establish common ground and reduce friction where people’s styles differ.
Use Decision-Making Frameworks
Decision-making frameworks (like the Decision Matrix or Decision Tree) can make decisions feel less overwhelming by giving you a firm foundation and a way to organise your thoughts. They help you concentrate and streamline your efforts.
If you need to make a group decision, having a framework ensures everyone understands the process, making it easier to keep things on track.
Schedule Mindfully
If you or your team have an important decision to make, do it earlier in the day, when you’re likely at your sharpest. Plan a break or some less intensive tasks afterward to give yourself a chance to recuperate (especially if it’s a really big decision).
To prevent unproductive overthinking, put safety measures in place like setting a time limit or deadline to reach a decision.
Task-batching may also be valuable here too. If you or someone on your team needs to make multiple decisions of a particular type (like signing off on tasks), try dedicating a set time slot to ticking them off. If you have a lot of project or creative feedback to deliver, find a time to give it your full attention. Batching reduces the additional cognitive strain caused by having to switch contexts between tasks.
Invest in Tools and Systems
The right tools for project, feedback, and task management can significantly reduce the cognitive overheads of decisions. By providing clarity and making workflows more automatic and intuitive, they eliminate a lot of coordination work and routine tasks. This leaves you free to focus on high priority work.
Using online proofing tools to streamline your review and approval workflows means there is a dedicated space to leave feedback and make decisions. You’ll have the tools to make it as straightforward as possible.
For example, keeping review and approvals centralized wastes less energy and time as people don’t need to search across different platforms for relevant information. Feedback is clearer and more precise, reducing the need for interpretation.
It also means asynchronous feedback is possible, batched and on your own schedule. Brenda Sesma at marketing agency Los De Idea explained how this works in practice for their team “For a creative director who is supervising 10 designers, it’s impossible for them to be available all the time. With ReviewStudio, they can review different projects on their own time, finding the most important and urgent tasks easily.”
Less Fatigue, Better Decision-Making
Overcoming decision fatigue is all about being more mindful about how and when you and your team make decisions. You can do this by evaluating decisions for impact, using decision-making frameworks and models, and streamlining how you do things with tools and routines.
By stripping out the unnecessary effort that often surrounds a decision, you can improve productivity and preserve mental resources for truly impactful decisions.
