Ep 44: How to Avoid Decision Fatigue (<20 Min)

This is a short "inbetween-isode" of <20 minutes in length. All the longer interviews and episodes can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast, and please let me know what you think on Twitter. I can be found at @tferriss http://www.twitter.com/tferriss. Enjoy! Tim

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, my little meteors. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to an in-between-isode for the Tim Ferriss Show. Quite a many of you have been asking for more in-between-isodes. And herewith follows such an episode. To differentiate from the normal episode, which is usually an in-depth interview, one to three hours in length, sometimes they're cut up into multiple parts, and those have been done with people ranging from Tony Robbins to billionaire co-founder slash founder slash investor Peter Thiel, all the way to people on the art side like Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park, chess prodigies like Josh Waitzkin, et cetera, et cetera. I just chewed Josh's name up a bit, but that's okay.

• 0:45Tim Ferriss?

  You can find all of those at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast, and you can also find them on iTunes, of course. But this in-between-isode is intended to be a bite-sized bit of musing, a philosophical food for thought, or perhaps principles or tactics that you can apply to your own life. And this in-between-isode is going to focus on decision fatigue and avoiding decision fatigue. This episode is brought to you by the Tim Ferriss Book Club. I read probably two to four books per week. I've read thousands, maybe tens of thousands of books, who knows? My math is failing me. But the Tim Ferriss Book Club highlights four to six books in total at this point that have had a huge impact on my life.

• 1:29Tim Ferriss?

  So if you go to audible.com/timsbooks, you can see all of those books. You can get free samples of all of them. And that is audible.com/timsbooks. So check it out if you are interested. Now, to avoiding decision fatigue. Before we get into talking about decision fatigue, and some of this didn't make it into The Four Hour Chef. So The Four Hour Chef is really a book on accelerated learning disguised as a cookbook, which... Thematically, it was a little confusing for some people, I think, but it is really my guide to accelerated learning and meta learning. There's the concept of minimum effective dose. This also pops up in the four hour body and in physical training.

• 2:11Tim Ferriss?

  And the idea is you're looking for the fewest variables, the least amount of effort to get your desired result. And the objective is not to do as much as possible, but the least that is required. And this is a principle that's been applied to Olympic track, for example, to break many, many world records. Because human beings, biological systems have to recover. There's a finite amount of resources that can be applied to different types of training and so on. That is also true of mental activities like work or skill acquisition, whether it be languages or cooking or anything else, playing tennis. You have to manage your resources and that's just intelligent use of choosing your inputs and the volume and so on.

• 2:56Tim Ferriss?

  So the minimum effective dose is really borrowed from medicine in effect. That's an easy way to explain it. And the idea is, let's just say you need antibiotics for some reason. Well, if you consume too little of the antibiotic, it's ineffective. You can't accomplish the goal, which is eradicating, let's say, Lyme disease or something like that. If you take just the right amount, the Goldilocks amount of that antibiotic, the minimum effective dose, you accomplish what you've set out to do with minimal side effects. And that is what we're aiming for. Of course, if you take too many of these antibiotics or too much of these antibiotics, you will suffer from side effects. And the side effects in some cases can be as debilitating or more debilitating than the problem you're trying to solve.

• 3:42Tim Ferriss?

  And that can be applied all over the place. So if you work too much, you exceed the minimum effective dose, you're going to suffer from health side effects, from societal or relationship side effects that are very negative, etc. So we're always looking for this minimum effective dose, the MED. And it ties into avoiding decision fatigue. So in the modern world overrun with digital minutia, it is extremely easy, since the amount of information produced on a daily basis outstrips your ability to ever consume it in your lifetime. You are confronted with superfluous decisions all the time.

• 4:23Tim Ferriss?

  And the part of being effective, part of being efficient, part of having a life that you love instead of loathe is minimizing unnecessary decisions. So, the MED is basically your entrance fee, if you will. If we look at it within the context of, say, culinary school. Alright, so your first round is really assembling, and we're not going to focus on cooking, so just bear with me as I get through the intro. The first round is really assembling the base of fundamentals required to be world-class. So there are many ways to be world-class in the world of cooking. But, anyone who is world-class shares certain fundamentals. And, this is the alphabet.

• 5:04Tim Ferriss?

  The ABCs that, while simple, can be used to compose anything from nonsensical poems that children are putting together, all the way up to Shakespeare. The ABCs are the same. So, in our case, we want to keep it simple. If this, then that. No choices. Okay? Choices are not your friend. For the most part. And, we want to have, whenever possible, checklists, or if-this, then-that types of rules. Algorithms for running our life or lives. So, in the world of cooking, here's a starting point. For each of the following categories I'm going to mention, there is a spice or herb that will almost never fail you. Okay?

• 5:49Tim Ferriss?

  And, this gives you a margin of safety, whether in cooking or in investing, where you can make a lot of mistakes, as long as you get this one choice right, and things will still turn out, not just okay, but in some cases spectacularly well. For instance, fish, use stenil or dill. Okay? Tomatoes, use basil.

• 6:11Tim Ferriss?

  I don't use those two together, by the way. But basil and dill are flavor enemies, so don't put those together. But fish, use fennel or dill. Tomatoes, use basil. Pork, use rosemary. Eggs, use tarragon. Tarragon goes with very little else, but it's miraculous on eggs. So if you're sick of having eggs on the slow carb diet in the morning, try some tarragon. And if you want to get fancy, you can get some white truffle sea salt. And those two things will buy you an additional six months of eating scrambled eggs in the morning. I kid you not. Okay? And we're going to then get out of cooking. But the point is, we have very simple if this, then that rules.

• 6:54Tim Ferriss?

  And we're minimizing choices and ensuring quality with one rule for each of these categories. Now, there are biological costs to decision making. And I want to encourage anyone interested in this concept to read a blog post that I wrote quite a while ago on how I manage this in a number of capacities. You can just search "choice minimal lifestyle", and then my name, Ferriss, F-E-R-R-I-S-S, on Google, and you'll find it. But imagine you have 100 points for making decisions every 24 hours. The more decisions you rack up in one area, the fewer decisions you can effectively make elsewhere. Okay? So if you make a ton of unnecessary decisions,

• 7:40Tim Ferriss?

  which email to check, what to do first in the morning, what breakfast to have, you're going to deplete your hit points. And that will lead to poor decision making later because you're going to run out of your 100 points. You will spend too much money on nonsense. You will grab the cookies at the department store on the way out, or at the grocery store, probably, instead of ignoring it. You will opt to postpone commitments. And you can consider, for instance, as an example, an experiment performed by researchers, I think it was at Florida State University. And this was chronicled in a New York Times magazine piece called "Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?" And it reads as follows, quote...

• 8:26Tim Ferriss?

  A nearby department store was holding a going out of business sales. So researchers from the lab went off to fill their car trunks with simple products. When they came to the lab, the students were told that they would get to keep one item at the end of the experiment, but first they had to make a series of choices. Would they prefer a pen or a candle, a vanilla scented candle, or an almond scented one? A candle or a T-shirt, a black T-shirt or a red T-shirt? A control group, meanwhile, let's call them the non-deciders, spent an equally long period contemplating all these same products without having to make any choices. Afterward, all the participants were given one of the classic tests of self-control: holding your hand in ice water for as long as you can.

• 9:10Tim Ferriss?

  The impulse is to, of course, pull your hand up, so self-discipline is needed to keep the hand underwater. The deciders gave up much faster. They lasted 28 seconds, less than, uh, that was less than half the 67-second average of the non-deciders. Keeping all those choices, or making all those choices, had apparently sapped their willpower, and it wasn't an isolated effect. It was concerned, it was confirmed, excuse me, in other experiments, testing students after they went through exercises like choosing courses from a college catalog. So how can you apply this? Uh, what is one of the simplest ways that you can apply this? Uh, decide what you are going to do for the first hour of your day. Do not make it something that is up to deciding.

• 9:54Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, what you're going to wear, what you're going to eat, uh, what you're going to read. Spec out the first hour of your day as if it were a takeoff checklist, and you were a pilot in an airline, alright? Make it as automated, as brain-dead as possible, so that if anyone, if you were to hand them this sheet of paper, or set of instructions in Evernote, or whatever, could replicate the first hour of your day perfectly. Really spell it out. And follow that for a week. What, and there, there are a number of people, Steve Jobs among them, who standardized what they wore, for instance, men in black style, so they didn't have to make any decisions. Practice that. Consider taking, let's just say, a set of white T-

• 10:36Tim Ferriss?

  T-shirts and one set of jeans for a week to minimize just that decision, which gives you an extra one or two hit points for the day, which should allow you to not only make better decisions, but also exert self-control when it comes to not doing things. This is something that's, that's not really discussed at length in my experience in the literature. And that is, it's, it's not just making bad decisions that we want to avoid. It's doing things or making decisions about things, uh, where decisions shouldn't be made at all. Things that are not worth your time. And, and famously, as, I think it was Peter Drucker, the management theorist, said, uh, there, there's no greater waste of energy or resources than doing well that which should not be done at all. Could have been Seneca,

• 11:17Tim Ferriss?

  could have been someone else. I think it was, uh, it was in this case, Drucker. Now, pulling from, uh, a number of different articles, and I'm also going to elaborate here. So, decision fatigue helps explain why ordinary sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can't resist the dealer's offer to rust proof their new car. And I believe this is actually from the same New York Times Magazine piece. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can't make decision after decision without paying a bi- a biological price. And I bolded this. I, I grabbed it and, uh, pulled it offline into, uh, Evernote. I also use Scrivener

• 12:02Tim Ferriss?

  for this kind of thing. Uh, but let me reiterate this. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, and let's, let's change that. No matter how rational, intelligent, or high-minded you are, you can't make decision after decision without paying a biological price. And there is a consequence to that price. It's different from ordinary physical fatigue. You're not consciously aware of being tired, but you're low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in one of two very different ways. The first shortcut is to become reckless, to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to think first through the consequences. You know, sure, tweet that photo, what could go wrong?

• 12:44Tim Ferriss?

  The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver and that is doing nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. And a good example of that is actually the table that I'm sitting at right now. There's stacks of paper all over the place. This is a bad habit of mine. I have hypergraphia, I take a ton of notes. And these stacks of business cards and whatnot have been just sitting here. And I've culled them, these are all ostensibly important things. And rather than make decisions about what should be scanned, what should be sorted, what should be thrown out, what should be somehow conveyed to you guys, my readers, for instance, because I think it's valuable, I just opt to do nothing. Everything just sits there. And typically it's because I go about my day, I do many different things, I spend 99

• 13:27Tim Ferriss?

  hit points, I come home and this is what I see on one side of the counter, in this table, all these stacks of paper, I opt to do nothing. All right, now, back to this excerpt. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the wrong way. But for the moment, it eases the mental strain. You start to resist any change, any potentially risky move, like releasing a prisoner who might commit a crime. So the fatigued judge on a parole board takes the easy way out and the prisoner keeps doing time. All right. Now, I'm gonna add a caveat of my own here, which is, you should not, not take into account, or you shouldn't believe that making decisions is always better than not making decisions.

• 14:10Tim Ferriss?

  There are areas, but this is also related to creating a choice minimal lifestyle, where you automate decisions so that you make decisions in your better interest, you don't sabotage yourself. One of those areas is in finances, for instance. And I think it was Warren Buffett, it might have been Charlie Munger, his partner, who said, "Don't just do something, stand there." Which is of course, in contrast to the usual expression, which is, "Don't just stand there, do something." And their thought was, "Don't just do something, stand there." Meaning... If you're going, you can die a death of paper cuts with investing if you're constantly, constantly frittering away your energy by day trading and things of that type.

• 14:55Tim Ferriss?

  The fees, the costs, the miscalculations will end up killing you oftentimes. And the, and there are many cases of this, and I talk more about this type of finance with Tony Robbins in my interview with him, so you can look for that. But there are ways to automate it. So, full disclosure, I'm an investor in this company, but there are companies like Wealthfront, which will help you to automate your investing and tax harvesting and so on, so that you do not agonize over decisions and then at your lowest point of hit points, right, when you're fatigued, respond in an emotional way. So, in other words, that would be buying high when things are on their way up and then

• 15:40Tim Ferriss?

  selling low after you freak out when it drops 20%, even though you could ride it out for three years and you'd be fine if you took that perspective. So, automate. Create a set of rules so you're able to make decisions in your best interest as consistently as possible. And that comes into the DISC framework in The 4-Hour Chef and creating incentives to do that. But, I don't want to get too off track here, I've had a lot of tea, I'm feeling pretty good, so I'm full-on sexy time, brain dumping, hopefully you guys are getting something out of it. The upshot of all of this is, for the aspiring student of business, sport, cooking, or any skill, all of this means one thing, control your variables. If you want to be a good scientist, what do you learn?

• 16:25Tim Ferriss?

  Control your variables, minimize the variables. If you want as few things in your life to go wrong as possible, create checklists. Automate the first 60 minutes of your day to set the tone, low stress, low decision-making, for the rest of your day. So, for, so you can reserve your decision-making power, your creativity, for the areas where it actually counts. Not choosing from 100 toothpastes in the grocery store, not deciding which pair of socks to wear, not deciding what you should have for breakfast in the morning, but for the things that actually matter, where you can express your unique capabilities.

• 17:05Tim Ferriss?

  So that is the secret of success, as far as I can tell. The secret to failure is trying to please everyone. One of the secrets to success, if there is one, is not unbound freedom, but selecting the proper constraints. So, thank you for listening. Hopefully, this was helpful, gives you some food for thought. And if you would like more in-between episodes like this, if you have suggestions for what you'd like to hear on the podcast in any capacity, please let me know on Twitter. It is twitter.com/TFerriss, T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S, two Rs, two S's, or Facebook, facebook.com/TimFerriss, all spelled out. Until next time, thank you for listening.