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    Drowning in Jam: How To Conquer "Decision Fatigue."

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    irfanar
    1. Constant decision-making leads to decision fatigue, as demonstrated by studies showing people overwhelmed by too many choices of jam or chocolate. 2. Exerting self-control throughout the day also depletes a limited cognitive resource called "ego". Tasks like resisting desserts or suppressing emotions have been shown to negatively impact unrelated tasks requiring self-control. 3. To combat decision fatigue and ego depletion, the article recommends making important decisions early, limiting options, accepting rather than second-guessing choices, taking breaks to indulge yourself, and believing that self-control is a renewable resource.

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    Drowning in Jam: How To Conquer "Decision Fatigue."

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    irfanar
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    1. Constant decision-making leads to decision fatigue, as demonstrated by studies showing people overwhelmed by too many choices of jam or chocolate. 2. Exerting self-control throughout the day also depletes a limited cognitive resource called "ego". Tasks like resisting desserts or suppressing emotions have been shown to negatively impact unrelated tasks requiring self-control. 3. To combat decision fatigue and ego depletion, the article recommends making important decisions early, limiting options, accepting rather than second-guessing choices, taking breaks to indulge yourself, and believing that self-control is a renewable resource.

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    1. Constant decision-making leads to decision fatigue, as demonstrated by studies showing people overwhelmed by too many choices of jam or chocolate. 2. Exerting self-control throughout the day also depletes a limited cognitive resource called "ego". Tasks like resisting desserts or suppressing emotions have been shown to negatively impact unrelated tasks requiring self-control. 3. To combat decision fatigue and ego depletion, the article recommends making important decisions early, limiting options, accepting rather than second-guessing choices, taking breaks to indulge yourself, and believing that self-control is a renewable resource.

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    Download as doc, pdf, or txt
    25 views4 pages

    Drowning in Jam: How To Conquer "Decision Fatigue."

    Uploaded by

    irfanar
    1. Constant decision-making leads to decision fatigue, as demonstrated by studies showing people overwhelmed by too many choices of jam or chocolate. 2. Exerting self-control throughout the day also depletes a limited cognitive resource called "ego". Tasks like resisting desserts or suppressing emotions have been shown to negatively impact unrelated tasks requiring self-control. 3. To combat decision fatigue and ego depletion, the article recommends making important decisions early, limiting options, accepting rather than second-guessing choices, taking breaks to indulge yourself, and believing that self-control is a renewable resource.

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    of 4

    Get it done.

    Oct. 12 2014 11:44 PM

    Drowning in Jam
    1.2k
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    How to conquer “decision fatigue.”


    By Jane C. Hu

    Life is like a box of chocolates: full of decisions.

    Photo illustration by Juliana Jiménez Jaramillo. Photos by Thinkstock

    After my first day of work in a new city, I found myself sprawled facedown on the carpet
    of my new apartment. I needed to buy a couch, to finish writing assignments from my last
    job, to walk the dog—but after deciding which route to take between home and work,
    choosing a health insurance plan, and setting up a dozen new account passwords, I was
    totally useless. My husband asked me what I wanted to eat for dinner, and I didn’t care,
    as long as I didn’t have to think up a menu. It turns out there’s a scientific explanation for
    what I was experiencing: decision fatigue.

    The name is self-explanatory; constant decision-making can be overwhelming. Think


    about something as simple as grocery shopping after work. Do you get the organic berries
    at $7 or the nonorganic at $4? Which style of pasta? Which brand of juice? If you’re like
    me, you only manage to pick out a few things before you get cranky.

    It may seem liberating to live in a land of infinite choices, but research in decision-
    making suggests otherwise. In a classic study, Stanford researchers set up shop at an
    upscale grocery store chosen for its “extraordinary selection” of items, including 300
    types of jam. One Saturday afternoon, they set up a sampling booth with 24 jams; on the
    next Saturday, they did the same but with just six jams.

    They found that people did seem to like the idea of having a lot of choices: More
    customers approached the 24-jam booth than the six-jam one. But people visiting the 24-
    jam booth tended to try only one or two jams—the same number as people in the six-jam
    group. When it came to buying jam, people in the hella-jams condition shut down,
    exhibiting what researchers call choice paralysis; only 3 percent bought any jam, whereas
    30 percent of people in the six-jam booth took home a jar. From this study, the
    researchers coined a theory, aptly called choice overload.

    The same researchers ran a similar study with chocolates, where people were asked to
    choose just one chocolate from either 30 choices or six. They found that people in the 30-
    chocolate group were more likely to experience regret about the choice they made. Still
    more research has found that repeated decision-making also leads to decreased self-
    control.

    Making decisions isn’t the only daily activity that can wear you down. It’s what you
    aren’t doing that can exhaust you, too. Maintaining self-control takes subconscious
    thought and effort—the box of donuts in the break room you’re resisting is a low-level
    distraction throughout your day. As one group of researchers put it: “Just as a muscle gets
    tired from exertion, acts of self-control cause short-term impairments in subsequent self-
    control.” Researchers call this ego depletion, referring to Freud’s “ego”: the moderate,
    socially acceptable version of ourselves that mediates between the superego and the id.

    Productivity decreases over time, so replenish your depleted ego by indulging your id.

    Scientists have tried a variety of tasks to deplete people’s self-control: asking them to
    hide their feelings after watching an emotional film, to avoid thinking about a white bear,
    or to resist desserts. They found that exerting self-control has effects on even seemingly
    unrelated tasks, such as stamina when squeezing a handgrip, whether people can stifle an
    inappropriate laugh, and how long they work on solving a frustrating problem.
    People who are ego-depleted or decision-fatigued are looking for ways to get out of
    having to exert more self-control or make decisions, so they tend to be passive instead of
    active. In one cruel study, researchers made a group of participants do an incredibly
    pointless and ego-depleting task: Cross out all the instances of e in a document, as long as
    it was more than one letter away from another vowel. (Meal is a no; vowel is a no; but
    mechanical would be a yes.)

    After that mind-numbing labor, participants were told that they would need to watch a
    video, but could stop it at any time to watch a clip of Saturday Night Live. The video was
    insanely boring—literally footage of a plain white wall. One group had to press a button
    to stop the video; the other had to hold down a button to keep watching the video. The
    button-pressers watched the boring video for a longer amount of time—in other words,
    people were so ego-depleted that even pressing a button felt like a lot of work. No
    wonder Netflix’s automatic “play next episode” function is so popular.

    Making decisions and exhibiting self-control are unavoidable daily activities; getting
    overwhelmed and sometimes making bad, impulsive decisions are occupational hazards
    of being human. But simple awareness of how to conserve your limited resources can
    help you stay productive throughout the day.

    First, get the important things out of the way early on in the day, before you’ve reached
    your frustration threshold or gotten distracted by break-room crullers. Checking off your
    to-do list when your cognitive resources are fresh is a good strategy for avoiding rash
    decisions.  

    Next, decrease your range of options. This may seem counterintuitive, since it requires
    making even more decisions. For instance, if you’re picking a restaurant for an important
    lunch meeting, first deciding on a certain part of town or type of cuisine can narrow your
    options. Like the participants in the jams study, you’re less likely to be paralyzed by
    choice if you have few options instead of dozens.

    Once you’ve arrived at a decision, stick with it. Ignore the naysaying voice in your head
    asking if this is the mutual fund that will make you the most money in 15 years or if the
    route your GPS gave you is the most gas-efficient. Just accept that no decision is ever
    completely perfect, and remind yourself that it is the best you can do with the tools you
    have in the moment. Second-guessing yourself only requires making more decisions,
    which further depletes your cognitive resources. You might also end up happier;
    researchers have found that people who “satisfice, “or pick an option that meets
    requirements, are more content with their choices than people who try to pick the best
    option.

    To limit the number of options you can consider, set a self-imposed time limit for
    decision-making. If you’re buying a new laptop bag, you could spend an infinite amount
    of time studying features and optimizing price and value—but if you give yourself only
    five minutes to make a decision, there are only so many bags you can consider. You’ll
    save time, and, if the research findings hold up in real life, you’ll be happier with your
    decision, too. For less important tasks, consider outsourcing your decision-making. If
    you’re wondering whether to hit the gym after work or call a client, let someone else
    make the decision for you. I use a simple yes/no generator: Think of a question, hit a
    button, and the website spits out a randomly generated yea or nay.

    Top Comment

    I lived in Germany when the wall came down. East Germans came to visit their relatives
    in the west. One of my friends took her cousin to buy shoes at a shop in Frankfurt.
    More...

    -Johanna25

    82 Comments Join In

    After all that decision-making, give yourself a break. Remember that productivity
    decreases over time, and try to replenish your depleted ego by indulging your id. Walk
    away from your desk. Splurge on a $6 coffee drink. Watch YouTube videos of puppies
    on Roombas. Take a long lunch and come back fresh. If self-control is like a muscle,
    taking a rest can refuel your supply.

    Changing your beliefs may actually make you more productive, too. Some researchers
    believe that the notion of ego depletion is all in your head, and that rejecting the idea of
    self-control as a muscle can combat its effects. People who instead believe that self-
    control is an infinite resource are less likely to show effects of ego depletion—they
    actually show increased performance on self-control tests after completing boring, ego-
    draining tasks like crossing out e’s from a document. Even weirder, how you feel about
    free will also affects your productivity: The more strongly you believe in it, the more
    likely you are to enjoy making decisions and to be happy with your choices. My
    apologies, readers, but your best bet at boosting your productivity may actually be to
    disregard what you’ve learned in this article.

    Jane C. Hu has a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California–Berkeley and is


    a 2014 AAAS Mass Media Fellow. Follow her on Twitter.

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