#129: The hidden burden of decision fatigue
Are you frustrated with yourself because you just can't get on with the work you care most about? Do you find it easier to make progress with emails and marking than to get your writing done? Is your procrastination out of control? Are you just unbelievably lazy?
Take a pause, my friend. There's a reason why you struggle to make progress on the important things, and it's not what you think. Tasks like writing are complicated, and require a ton of decision-making in order to make progress. That's exhausting, but it becomes impossible if you refuse to recognise that it's necessary. The result is that you end up prioritising those less important tasks but easy-to-complete tasks.
Don't worry, though: help is at hand. Join The Academic Imperfectionist for a sneak peek at what's throwing you off course, and how to fix it.
References
Danziger S, Levav J, Avnaim-Pesso L. Extraneous factors in judicial decisions. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2011 Apr 26;108(17):6889-92. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1018033108. Epub 2011 Apr 11. PMID: 21482790; PMCID: PMC3084045.
Pignatiello GA, Martin RJ, Hickman RL Jr. Decision fatigue: A conceptual analysis. J Health Psychol. 2020 Jan;25(1):123-135. doi: 10.1177/1359105318763510. Epub 2018 Mar 23. PMID: 29569950; PMCID: PMC6119549.
Schwartz B, Ward A, Monterosso J, Lyubomirsky S, White K, Lehman DR. Maximizing versus satisficing: happiness is a matter of choice. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2002 Nov;83(5):1178-97. doi: 10.1037//0022-3514.83.5.1178. PMID: 12416921.
Episode transcript:
Sometimes getting started on a task doesn’t look the way you expect.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and in this podcast I draw on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello, everyone! After a couple of fantastic interview episodes, looks like it’s back to being just us. Very much looking forward to spending a bit of quality time with you for the next twenty five minutes or so. How have you been? Have you been getting the important things done? Don’t worry, I’m not here to nag you or make you feel guilty - whatever your answer, it will stay just between us. I wonder, though, if you’ve noticed - probably with frustration - that when it comes to how we spend our time, we don’t always prioritise what’s most important to us. You know how it is. Perhaps your writing is the thing you care most about getting done, and getting done well, but somehow it gets pushed to the bottom of your list, and you end up spending your time on tasks that … well, do need to get done, but which aren’t as close to your heart as your writing. This is something that lots of my coaching clients experience, and which I experience myself, and it leads to that rather depressing feeling of being disappointed and frustrated with ourselves even when we’ve made progress with stuff that needs to be done, because we think we should have done other stuff before we got to that stuff.
Explaining why this happens is more complicated than it might at first seem, which is why I want to talk about it here. I expect that, if asked why you’ve just spent the day replying to emails when you meant to spend it making progress on that chapter you need to write, you could come up with a few answers. Perhaps you’d mention that you find it more uncomfortable to let other people down than you do to let yourself down, so you’d rather stall on your writing project than keep other people waiting for replies to their emails. Perhaps you’d mention the time-sensitivity of certain tasks: what’s most important isn’t always urgent, and what’s urgent isn’t always especially important, which means that - if you’re not careful - you can end up firefighting by dealing with the urgent stuff and never getting around to the important stuff. Perhaps you’re having to prioritise stuff that you’re actually paid to do, even though - aside from the financial aspect - you care about it much less than your writing. As I said, it’s complicated why we spend our time in the way that we do, and often in a way that feels disconnected from our values.
But, in all likelihood, there’s something else going on, especially if you’re a bit of a perfectionist. Something that’s not very easy to spot. It’s something that comes to light if you’ve ever felt a weird sense of relief to be faced with a day full of monotonous, unrewarding tasks that you need to get through. This is something I always experience when I have a day set aside to mark essays. I know that I’m going to end up punch-drunk - or maybe word-drunk - from reading answers to the same questions again and again and again, but there’s something to be said for tackling a well-defined task with clear success conditions. It’s very obvious what I need to do, how I need to do it, and when I’m done. There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end of this task. I know, before I start, approximately how much progress I’ll have made by the end of the day if I manage not to get distracted too much. I don’t particularly relish the task, but at least it’s a straightforward one that I can launch into and quickly make progress.
Writing, though. Occasionally writing is a straightforward task, like if you’re working with a draft and you have comments or questions from a supervisor or a colleague or a reviewer that you need to address. But often it’s not like that. Sometimes we don’t know exactly what we’re going to be writing about. We might be unsure whether to get writing or do some more reading first. If we do decide to get writing, we might be unsure about how to go about it. What, exactly is our argument? How can we best articulate and categorise the half-formed thoughts that are swimming around in our head? There are so many decisions to make before we can even get started. And making those decisions is only the start of our worries, because once we make a decision, we then need to worry about whether it was the right decision. We decide to get started on our writing instead of doing some more reading, but there’s our inner critic whispering in our ear, telling us that we’re rushing things and being rash and we’re going to end up sounding uninformed. If we change course and do the reading first, our inner critic has things to say about that, too. All this means that we can’t just get on with the task and make progress, the way we can with something like essay marking or answering emails. We’re not confident that we’re making progress because we worry we’re going about things the wrong way. We might be heading down a dead end alley, and then when we arrive at our desk tomorrow morning we’ll be no further ahead than we are now. All of which is to say that getting down to writing - or any other task where it’s not absolutely clear from the outset how you need to go about it - is not just about the effort of willpower required to sit there and bang out the words. There are decisions to make, and with them, anxiety about making the wrong decision. However hard you work, however committed you are to avoiding distractions, your inner critic is there to make you feel that you’re making things worse, not better. And, when you inevitably feel bad about yourself, of course those distractions are hard to resist. Anything to provide you with some relief from the fear that you’re doing it wrong.
Does that sound familiar? If so, solidarity, my friend. This was my life for many years. It’s still my life now, when I try to get down to writing. I still find it hard and I still worry about doing it wrong. I’ve done so much work over the past few years on developing a more positive relationship with my writing - much of that, of course, has emerged in episodes of this podcast - but I still have to work at talking myself out of avoiding getting down to it, sometimes with more success than at other times. In the past, it was very obvious to me what the problem was: I was lazy, undisciplined, undeserving. I needed to get on with it, other people got on with it, but not me, and that made me a terrible person. My understanding of what was really going on is much more nuanced now, but in coaching sessions, I often see other people going through similar struggles. People who are the opposite of the things I used to call myself, but who can’t see that, because all they see is the struggle they have getting the work done, and who chalk it all down to plain old procrastination. Which it often is, I guess. But, as I’ve talked about before, that label - ‘procrastination’ - hides a lot of complexity. I talked about some of that complexity in episode #116: Procrastination is a bad idea, where I argued that what we often think of as a battle between ‘doing work’ and ‘procrastinating’ is more usefully viewed in terms of two needs that often, but needn’t, compete with each other: our need for comfort and our need to do things that are relevant to our goals. I want to talk about another aspect of procrastination here. Specifically, sometimes behaviour that we label - and dismiss - as procrastination is actually decision fatigue.
In a 2021 review article in the Journal of Health Psychology, Grant Pignatiello and colleagues characterise decision fatigue as - quote - ‘the impaired ability to make decisions and control behaviour as a consequence of repeated acts of decision-making’. One of the most well-known illustrations of decision fatigue is a 2011 study by Shai Danziger and colleagues. This study looked at judges who were making parole decisions, and found that judges were more likely to grant parole early in the day. In the morning, 65% of people were getting parole. Later on, almost nobody was getting parole. But if the judges took a break and had something to eat, their generosity returned close to their morning levels. The lesson is that too many decisions make us tired. We get worse at making decisions: we overthink, we make the wrong choices, we try to avoid making decisions at all, which means we stick with the status quo.
Now, I don’t know how many of you are currently awaiting a parole hearing, but if you are, consider sacrificing your lie-in and angling for the 9am slot. But, of course, the issue that those judges were struggling with isn’t unique. It affects you when you sit down at your desk and try to get on with your writing. Do you work on this chapter or that one? You’ve got yourself in a bit of a muddle with the paragraph you were working on yesterday - should you grit your teeth and work through the problem, or would it benefit you to switch to something else and return to it later, refreshed? You’ve just seen that there’s a potentially relevant article that was just published - should you read that before trying to continue, or would that risk overwhelming you? What an absolute avalanche of decisions you’re faced with - and it’s often worse than the way I’ve described it here, because at least I’ve explicitly articulated the choices, but we don’t always do that. Sometimes those choices barely bubble up into our consciousness, and we experience them simply as a lack of clarity about the next thing we should be doing. And since we don’t know what the next thing is that we should be doing, we don’t make progress.
Actually, things are even worse than that. It’s not simply that there are lots of exhausting decisions to make. Decision fatigue is magnified if you’re a perfectionist. In a 2002 study, Barry Schwartz and colleagues found that people who want to make the best possible choice - ‘maximisers’ - end up feeling less happy, less optimistic, less satisfied, more overwhelmed, and more regretful as a result of their decision-making than ‘satisficers’, who focus on simply making a choice that is ‘good enough’. And, you probably don’t need me to point out that smart, ambitious, analytical people - that’s you - are more likely to be maximisers than satisficers.
Ok, enough about the interesting studies by authors whose names I am probably mispronouncing (sorry, guys, if you’re listening). If you think you might be affected by decision fatigue, there are lots of helpful suggestions out there. Just google it and you’ll find lots of articles and lots of advice. Things like: make your most important decisions early in the day, try to eliminate as many decisions as possible, take breaks - like those judges - to restore your decision-making capacity when it starts to flag, and of course try to be a satisficer rather than a maximiser, at least in those situations where ‘good enough’ really is good enough and where maximising comes with diminishing returns. All of this is good, solid advice.
However. You knew there was a ‘however’, didn’t you? In my experience - my own, along with people I’ve coached - those who struggle most with decision fatigue aren’t struggling with it simply because they aren’t very good at taking steps to manage and reduce it. A bigger problem, for these people, is that they don’t even realise that they’re struggling with it. They don’t even realise it’s a thing. They don’t see it. All they see is that, for whatever reason, and probably just because they’re a bit rubbish, they can’t get on with their work. They write themselves off as lazy, and don’t try to dig any deeper than that - a pitfall that Katrien Devolder warned us all about in the previous episode. Their battle with decision fatigue is hidden from them - and that gives them a dangerously skewed view of themselves and their relationship with their work.
‘Dangerous’. Bit of a dramatic word there, Rebecca, isn’t it? I’m really not using it lightly. The reality is that the decisions you need to grapple with before you can get started on a task like writing are part of the task. They require significant cognitive energy. But if you don’t realise this - if you think of those decisions not as part of the task, but as part of the general faffing and organising you need to do before you start the task, then you’re not giving yourself any credit for the hard work you’re doing before you get to the actual writing. Perhaps you spend an entire morning, an entire day, an entire week, even, or longer - semi-consciously getting to grips with decisions that are relevant to your work, which is demanding and exhausting, and all the while you’re viewing yourself as yet to get started on the work. You feel like you’re procrastinating, unnecessarily delaying, as if you were lying in bed or luxuriating in a bath. That makes you inefficient, miserable, feeling like you don’t deserve any rest, and - if you’re not careful - burnt out.
So, before you get to a point where you can implement all the advice that’s out there about decision fatigue, you first need to recognise that you’re experiencing it: that decisions are demanding, and that they’re part of your work, not a preamble to it. I think that recognising this comes with two really important benefits. The first is that you can stop berating yourself for not having got started on your work yet. You are working - it’s just that you’re doing a task that you perhaps hadn’t realised you needed to do.
The second is that recognising that all this decision-making is a respectable part of your work enables you to make a better job of it. If you’re viewing it simply as procrastination, an inexcusable waste of time, then it’s tempting to rush through it so that you can get to the real work. If, on the other hand, you recognise it as something you need to do, then it’s easier to allow yourself to slow down and take a reflective approach to it. Explicitly acknowledge what the various decisions are that you need to make, and give some thought to which ones are most deserving of your mental resources. Which ones do you need to make, now, today? Which ones have far-reaching consequences, and are perhaps more important to get right? Are there any that don’t matter that much, and which are slowing you down and sapping energy you could be directing into other things? (I’m looking at you, everyone who has ever devoted an hour or two to browsing all the available fonts in Microsoft Word and pondering which would look nicest for your current project.) Are there any that you can automate? Any that you can delegate? And so on. If listening to this description is itself making you feel tired, then I sympathise. I never said that allowing yourself to give your full attention to these decisions, and recognising them as an important part of your work, is a cure for decision fatigue. But it does mean that, when you inevitably end up tired from all those decisions, you can take a restorative break safe in the knowledge that you’ve been doing something important and useful, and not simply wasting time.
I’ve been talking about decision fatigue as it relates to writing (oh, and parole hearings), but it crops up in all sorts of areas. I am recording this episode while sitting at a nice big desk that has lots of drawers in it, and most of those drawers are empty, or almost empty, despite my having chosen the desk in part because of all those nice drawers. Meanwhile, I have stacks of paper and other nonsense piled up on top of the desk, and also in various other places in my house where they look messy and gather dust. I wish that the piles of stuff were instead neatly organised and filed away in my empty drawers (or the bin, which is probably where about 75% of it belongs), but I haven’t yet managed to work my way through the series of decisions required to sort through the stuff and decide where to put it. It’s never a high enough priority. There are always other things to think about, and after thinking about them I am too depleted to make sensible decisions about my office storage solutions. (That’s what we call desk drawers these days, isn’t it?) If I concentrate, I can feel compassion and understanding towards myself about this. I’m a fairly overwhelmed person doing her best to get the important stuff done. But if I don’t concentrate, it’s easy for me to feel frustrated with myself - and it’s a weird sort of frustration, because it’s not as if I think that I should spend time tidying my office today or this week instead of the other stuff I’ve got going on. It’s because I think that I ought to have already solved this problem. And that means that I end up telling myself off for not having solved it while also being unwilling to prioritise solving it over other things, which would realistically be required in order to get it done. Bananas, isn’t it? We fall into this way of thinking when it comes to decisions about writing, too. When I have coaching clients who express frustration that they are not just getting on with their writing, or some other complicated task, I often invite them to explore with me why they’re not getting on with it. Very often, there are decisions to make before they can get on with it, and they need to set aside time to make those decisions before they can progress, which they don’t really want to have to do because they’re convinced that they’re already lagging behind. They need to make time for those decisions. Yes, that can be frustrating. But, actually, it’s less frustrating than demanding something impossible of yourself. As I’ve said before on this podcast: writing involves much more than just writing.
Let me leave you with a question, my friends. Is there something in your life that you think you should just be getting on with? Something that leads you to feel frustrated and stressed whenever you think about your unsatisfactory progress? If so, dial down the volume on your inner critic for a moment and ask yourself if it is clear to you exactly how you should be going about this task: what’s the first thing you need to do to get started, and what’s the next thing, and the next? If there’s any uncertainty about that, then it sounds like you have some decisions to make. Exhausting decisions, perhaps, but necessary ones. Consider setting aside some time to catalogue those decisions and work out how to approach them. And remind yourself that, in doing so, you’re not delaying getting started. You are getting started.
Take care, and speak soon.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d leave a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You can find me on Medium too, as AcademicImperfectionist. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via the contact form on my website or via Medium. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!
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