By 9:15 a.m., Marcus had already made eighteen decisions.
The blue shirt or the gray. Scrambled eggs or yogurt. Whether to reply to a text from someone he hadn’t seen in years.
Each choice felt inconsequential on its own, but by the time he opened his laptop, something in him had already dimmed.
He stared at the screen, a half-written report blinking back, and felt the familiar fog descend.
It wasn’t burnout. It wasn’t stress. It was something quieter. Something that crept in unnoticed.
Decision fatigue.
The Mental Cost of Too Much Freedom
We live in a culture that celebrates choice. The more options, the better.
Customized coffee, personalized playlists, ten different health insurance plans. Choice has become a proxy for freedom.
But behind every choice, however small, is a withdrawal from the same mental account.
The brain doesn’t distinguish between picking toothpaste and deciding whether to sign a lease. It just gets tired.
Marcus didn’t know the term for it. He only knew that by 3 p.m., he often couldn’t decide what to eat—not because he wasn’t hungry, but because he didn’t care anymore.
He was too tired to care.
Last month, he missed an important deadline—not because he didn’t know about it, but because he couldn’t get himself to act. He saw the calendar notification.
He snoozed it twice.
By the time he tried to send the file, the client had moved on. He wasn’t even angry at himself. Just numb.
A Scientific Example: Judges and Parole Boards
The science behind decision fatigue isn’t new.
In one well-known study, researchers at Columbia University analyzed more than 1,000 parole board hearings. Judges were more likely to grant parole early in the day. As their mental energy wore down, they defaulted to denial—not out of bias, but exhaustion.
As the hours passed, their decisions became more conservative, more automatic, less considered.
Marcus wasn’t deciding the fate of anyone’s life, but the principle still applied.
Every unanswered email, every delayed decision, every quiet moment of “I’ll deal with this later” was not about laziness. It was depletion. And over time, it cost him. Not in dramatic failures, but in tiny avoidances that added up to missed chances, misread conversations, and slowly eroded trust.
How High Performers Avoid the Trap?
High performers don’t overcome decision fatigue with sheer willpower. They use strategy.
Barack Obama famously wore only blue or gray suits during his presidency. “I have too many other decisions to make,” he said.
Steve Jobs wore black turtlenecks. Elite athletes eat the same meals before every game.
These aren’t quirks. They’re shields.
By reducing trivial choices, they protect their energy for what truly matters.
Marcus’s Quiet Shifts
Marcus didn’t overhaul his life overnight. He began with something small: tuna salad every Tuesday. No more deliberation. Just a decision he never had to make again.
Then he stopped checking email first thing in the morning, using that window to focus on creative work.
He started setting what he called a “decision budget”—three important choices per day. The rest could wait.
Most important of all, he began to rest.
Not collapse-on-the-couch rest. The kind that actually restores: walking around the block, five minutes of stillness between calls, closing his laptop and looking out the window without picking up his phone.
Studies show that short, intentional breaks replenish cognitive stamina. Rest isn’t a luxury or a reward. It’s part of the system.
Stewarding the Self
There’s something both comforting and uncomfortable about realizing that many of our worst decisions—or indecisions—stem not from character, but from capacity.
That our minds, like batteries, run low.
And that the cost of that depletion isn’t always dramatic. It’s quiet. It shows up in the life we didn’t design—because we couldn’t decide.
Marcus still had messy mornings. Still forgot things sometimes. Still scrolled too late into the night.
But the difference was, he understood the game now. It wasn’t about doing more. It was about choosing when to choose.
That’s the real discipline of the high performer—not to eliminate choices, but to steward them.
To know that every decision, no matter how small, carries weight. And to choose, consciously, when to carry it.