A great place to start as you try to beat information overload is by removing the difficult decisions in your life that are taking up our precious ‘mental bandwidth.’
Many people believe that time is the reason we aren’t able to get enough done during the day. We all tend to make excuses for the things we fail to do, like exercise, because we don’t have the time. This isn’t actually true. Just look back over your last week and think about those times that you spent a couple of hours on Facebook, YouTube, or any other website. What about all the time you spent watching TV? This is all time that you could have been using to complete tasks.
The problem isn’t time. The question becomes your lack of energy. The reason that you’re not entirely utilizing the time that is available to you is that you’re low on energy. Your lack of energy can also decrease your will-power decreasing your ability to encourage yourself to act.
Energy management is more important than time management when it comes to overcoming information overload. A significant component of energy management is the ability to understand how big an impact making decisions have on our energy levels. Every time you have to make a decision, we take a hit on our energy levels, leaving you with less energy to spend on other, more critical tasks.
Every decision that you have to make, whether it’s deciding what to wear or what you want to eat for lunch, uses up your mental energy. This means that you will have less energy when it comes to making other, more important decisions.
How to Reduce Decisions
There are several things that you can do to help you save your mental energy. You could go the route of Steve Jobs who wanted to reduce the number of little decision he made every day. He removed all variations from his wardrobe, leaving nothing but black t-shirts and jeans, so he never had to worry about what he was going to wear again.
While this is an extreme measure, and not everyone will want to surrender all variations of their clothing, there are some more gently and moderate solutions that you can apply in your own life.
Limiting Your Clothing
You may not want to go as far as Steve Jobs as far as surrendering all variations of your clothing. There are other practical ways to reduce the decision making that surrounds choosing your attire. One of the easiest ways to do this is just to plan your outfits in advance so that you have all the items you need ready to go in the morning. You can go as far as writing this out on Sunday’s for the entirety of your week. This method, while it sounds great in theory, often falls in practice. For example, what happens if you put the outfit on and don’t like how it looks or are just not in the mood to wear it?
Another solution is to have a limited number of items in your closet that you know you like and that you know are suitable. This allows you to refer to any of the things in the morning without giving it much thought. While you are narrowing down your wardrobe to a small handful of acceptable items, be sure to choose your clothes in a way that they can be combined into multiple different outfits. This entails making sure that most of your tops will work with most of your pants. This will allow you to throw together numerous combinations without a lot of thought.
Limiting Your Food Choices
If you don’t want to have to restrict your clothing choices, you can always restrict your food choices to help you reduce the number of decisions you have to make every day. You can do this by keeping your breakfast and lunch choices consistent throughout the week.
These meals don’t tend to be exciting in the first place. So, why not have the same meal at every breakfast and lunch? Keeping your breakfast and lunch consistent helps you to reduce the decisions you have to make, as well as reducing waste. It can also make shopping much easier because you don’t have to search for a bunch of different ingredients.
Automate Your Shopping
If you choose to automate a lot of what you eat to help you limit your decisions, this will also create the opportunity to make your weekly shopping trips considerably easier. You can utilize your local supermarket’s delivery system to automate your weekly shopping. Most stores now offer this convenience, which allows you to avoid the stressful ‘weekly shopping’ trip, picking up a few additional ingredients for your meals instead.
Scheduling Your Evenings
To further reduce decision fatigue, you can plan your daily activities in the evening. This is done by making each night of the week ‘something night.’ For example, Monday night can become your ‘rest night’ where you allow yourself to watch TV without the guilt. You can make Tuesday night your ‘date night’ where you commit the evening to spending quality time with your significant other.
By setting tasks like this for each evening, you remove the stressful need to make the right decision and instead merely carry out and execute your plan to stay on top of things.
Reducing the daily decisions that you have to make will help you to simplify your life. There are many more methods that you can use to accomplish this, so start putting them into action and begin reducing the number of decisions you have to make. By getting yourself organized, you can start to beat information overload and develop a clearer mind to help you move forward.
