Ever find yourself completely drained by the end of the day, unable to make even the simplest decisions—like where to eat or what to tackle next? Or maybe you finally get a pocket of unexpected free time, but instead of using it productively, you waste half of it trying to figure out what to do? That, my friend, is decision fatigue, and it’s more than just feeling overwhelmed—it’s an actual mental drain that makes everyday life harder than it needs to be.

The good news? You don’t have to stay stuck in this cycle. Decision fatigue isn’t just about making too many choices—it’s about how we approach them. With the right systems in place, you can cut out unnecessary decision-making, free up mental energy, and feel more in control of your time.

In this episode, we’re diving into:

• Why decision fatigue happens (and how it’s not just in your head)
• The everyday choices that are secretly zapping your energy
• Simple planning strategies that eliminate unnecessary decisions
• How to make better, faster decisions—without the stress

Listen to the episode here!

Or watch the episode here!

I’d be honored and grateful if you would head over to iTunes to leave a review and let other female entrepreneurs know what you learned! While you’re there, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss an episode.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Do you struggle with decision making or maybe just hate making decisions? If so, this episode is for you. 

[00:00:12] Tell me if either one of these scenarios sounds familiar to you. scenario number one, it's the end of the day, doing all sorts of stuff, right? You and your friends or family decide you're going out to dinner and everyone looks to you and says, well, where do you want to go? And on the inside, you're dying a little and you just want to yell for the love. 

[00:00:32] Someone else, please decide. I don't care. Right? Like you are tapped out. The thought of making the decision about where to go for dinner just is too much, right? I know I definitely get that way sometimes or there's another scenario. Maybe this one rings a little bit more true for you. All right. All of a sudden, it's one of those days where you find yourself with an unplanned pocket of free time. 

[00:00:56] And you're so excited because you have so much to do, right? And you're like, Oh my gosh, maybe an appointment got canceled or something. You're like, I have a free 30 minutes. And then. you waste 15 of those minutes trying to figure out what to do with the time that you were just given. 

[00:01:11] You can't make a decision of, of how to spend it. And so then you're like, well, surely my phone has the answer. So we pick up our phone and then all of a sudden all that free time is gone and we've been scrolling and now we have regrets the decisions we made there. Right. Now. The fact is both of these kind of decision making scenarios that I just mapped out can be avoided with the right planning because the fact is with 100 percent certainty that Planning supports better decision making, right? 

[00:01:46] And today I'm going to be breaking down, kind of going a little bit more in depth into those two scenarios to help you understand what type of decisions are at play here and then what specific types of planning can really support us in that decision making. So first let's kind of revisit that scenario number one, right, where it's the end of the day. 

[00:02:09] And you're like. Please don't make me make the decision about where to go for dinner. Well, the reason this is happening is because you have hit a point in your day where you are maxed out with what's called decision fatigue. If that's a term you have not heard before, it's not one that I made up. What it's saying is you have made so many decisions over the course of the day that your brain is simply done. 

[00:02:37] It is saying, I don't have capacity to do this anymore. And guys, there's actual neurosciency stuff at play here as to why it is a fact you are indeed decision fatigued. Just as if you were lifting heavy, heavy weights, there will be a point at which your muscles are fatigued and absolutely can't lift it anymore. 

[00:02:57] This is happening in our brain, the more decisions we have to make all day long, the quicker our brain gets fatigued and when we have maxed out that decision making part of our brain, we start either avoiding decision making, right, the please just somebody else decide or Or we start making really bad decisions because our brain doesn't have the capacity to really think through rationally and intelligently. 

[00:03:30] And guys, this is another reason why at, you know, 10 in the morning, I can easily walk by that sleeve of thin mints that my husband just bought the other day. But at six o'clock at night, it's a little bit harder. It's because my brain is fatigued and it has to work harder to rationalize why I don't need to sit down with a sleeve of thin mints. 

[00:03:51] All right. So how does planning help us reduce decision fatigue? Well, you all have heard me say before, if not, and you're new to the show here, you're going to hear a phrase you're going to hear me say often a task list is not a plan. Now most people are taught. To wake up at the start of a day, create your list for the day, right? 

[00:04:14] Here's the list of everything that you need to get done. And then all day long, you're referencing it. And every time you look at the list, guess what you're doing? You're making a decision about what to do next. the second layer to this is the more things you have to choose against. The harder it is to make the decision. 

[00:04:38] So if I have a list of two tasks and say, which one should I do first? It's a pretty easy decision for my brain. It doesn't require a lot. But if I have, you know, I don't know, 13, 21 things on that list, and I'm looking at it, and I'm asking my brain, Hey, let's decide which one to do first, and it's scanning across 15, let's just land on 15, 15 different things to do, it's gonna have to work a lot harder to go, Which one do I do first? 

[00:05:07] we're stretching it way. Like we're lifting that heavy, heavy weight right out of the gate. Now you'd make your decision. You go execute it. Then you're coming back to that same list. And now there's one less thing. So now you're looking at 14 things and you're making a decision and you're doing this all day long. 

[00:05:27] You're making these, I call these micro decisions. All day long if you're operating from a task list, which is why the more things you have to choose against, the quicker you're going to hit decision fatigue. And this is why at the end of every day, you're like, I am tapped out. Well, instead of operating from a task list, if we learn how to embrace weekly planning, that is showing us, my plan tells me, if you're looking at the video here, I'm holding up my planner, my planner tells me with detail what I'm doing and when I'm doing it. 

[00:06:07] Now, did I have to make decisions when I created my plan? Yes, I did, but I did it in one sitting. I sit down once before the week starts and create my plan for the week. Then all week long, I am looking at my planner, not to make decisions, but to have my planner tell me. Here's what we're doing next, Megan. 

[00:06:29] Here's what you already made the decision about. So when we shift from daily task making to planning our weeks, what we're doing is we're essentially getting rid of that constant decision making that needs to happen all day long. And this is why I can kind of roll into my evening hours I was far less fatigued than when I was operating from that daily task list mode. 

[00:07:00] All right, now let's shift into that second scenario that I, that I wanted to talk about that also connects in with decision making, right? So if you remember, I'm, I'm giving the example of all of a sudden it's one of those days, maybe an appointment gets canceled and you find yourself with an unplanned pocket of time. 

[00:07:19] And you're like, Oh my gosh, I didn't, I didn't expect to have this 45 minutes today. Okay. What am I going to do? How should I spend my time? So you're making a decision about what to spend time on, right? Well, if you don't have a planning system in place that tells you, Hey, if you have extra time, here's what, here's what we should do. 

[00:07:43] You're going to end up spinning. Right. You're going to waste gosh knows how long trying to decide what to do, or you're just going to give up and spend the time doing something pointless that you later may regret and be like, man, I wished I'd remembered that I wanted to be doing that other thing. I could have totally gotten that done in that 45 minute window. 

[00:08:02] So what kind of planning can we put in place for these scenarios? Well, at the start of when I'm doing my weekly planning process, I have a little space over on the side of my planner that's just labeled, has a little area for notes, where I write down, hey, if I have any extra time this week that I wasn't planning on having, here are some things I'd really like to do. 

[00:08:27] That's different than what goes into my plan. My plan of, you know, set dates and times for doing things. Those are the things I'm prioritizing. It's like this stuff's got to get done, but if I have free time I wasn't planning on, here's how I'd like to spend it. So then what happens, and friends, it just happened yesterday. 

[00:08:44] It was a glorious afternoon. I, I didn't need to do anything in that kind of afternoon window with my daughter, and I had about 45 minutes to kill before dinner. Well, without this little short list, I guarantee you what would have happened is I would have sat down, probably made a snack and I would have just entertained myself looking at videos. 

[00:09:04] But instead, I went and looked over at that little spot and I had made a note that there was a book I wanted to start reading that I was kind of excited to check out and I had completely forgotten about it. I was like, oh, great. I went and grabbed the book, still grabbed the snacks, but I went outside and spent that 45 minutes in a way that I'm so glad that's how that time went. 

[00:09:25] But if I just suddenly went, I have free time and in the moment and making decisions, just, you know, in my brain of how to spend it nine 10, we're not going to remember or choose the things that we later wished. we had done. Now there's a little bonus thing that I want to mention here on how a specific type of planning can help support what I call rational decision making. 

[00:09:52] tell me if this sounds familiar. you wake up in the morning, you, you've got your list or maybe even you have your plan for the day, like, here's what I'm doing, here's when I'm doing it this happened to me today, and all of a sudden something happens that derails your day or your morning. 

[00:10:08] This morning, I woke up. As I sit down to do the things I had planned to do, I had a dog who decided that she got into something in the woods and decided that she needs to start throwing up all morning, right? Derailed everything. I'm dealing with this, I'm cleaning up messes, in and out with the dog, all this stuff, right? 

[00:10:23] Now, here's what will start to happen. If you get derailed from what you were planning on doing, With some unplanned event, emergency, or et cetera, what starts to happen is we start spiraling. I have a friend, Maria, who always called this getting on the bus. Meaning, in that moment, we start this kind of self talk. 

[00:10:41] I knew this would happen. This always happens. Now I'm not getting this thing done that I'm supposed to be getting done. I don't know when I'm going to get it done. This means I'm probably going to have to stay up late, but I can't stay up late, or if I do, then it's going to be a really bad, it's going to turn in the report, and it's going to be awful. 

[00:10:54] And if the report's awful, I'm going to get fired. If I get fired and this kind of, there's no way I'm going to be able to find another job. And you know what? I'm going to be homeless in five years, right? We just start talking like this and we just start thinking completely irrationally. When we get stressed and anxious about something, we do not think rationally and we don't make rational decisions. 

[00:11:16] So how we respond in the moment. is usually, at least for me, really over the top. if you have a visual plan in place, whether it's on paper or whether it's digital, for your week and something like that happens, as it did to me this morning, of course, I'm still going to be upset in the moment, but instead of spiraling and starting to make really irrational decisions about how to handle it in the moment, instead, I can look at my plan for the week and see, oh, guess what? 

[00:11:49] I see I have space available over here. And I can see that I can just move this thing over here or move these two things around to accommodate the fact that this emergency has happened. 

[00:12:03] The fact is, when you have a visual plan, you make much more rational. Decisions. All right, because you're showing your brain that you know, it's kind of like a puzzle at that point. We can move things around. We can figure it out. Now, if you want to see what some of this planning looks like, I invite you to go download my app from the app store. 

[00:12:27] It's called the Pink Bee, all one word, because in it I have some trainings that show you visually. What these plans look like so that you can start to ask like as you're looking at it ask yourself Okay, if I had this in place, I bet I would make very different decisions About how I'm spending my time and I could totally reduce decision fatigue in my life because guys I'm telling you if you can especially eliminate that decision fatigue element. 

[00:12:57] Oh You are gonna have much more Evenness of both physical and mental energy and capacity all day long.