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I spent forty minutes last yesterday deciding whether to reply to a three-sentence email. Not because it was complicated.
Because by 2pm I had already made about sixty small choices-what to eat, what to wear, which task to open first, whether to reschedule a call- and my brain was running on fumes.
I typed a draft, deleted it, reopened it, and eventually walked to the kitchen for a glass of water instead. The email got answered the next morning in thirty seconds.
That moment made me realise I had been thinking about decision fatigue completely wrong-and once I understood why, I changed how I structure every day.
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You have probably heard the two-minute rule: if something takes less than two minutes, do it now.
David Allen popularised it in Getting Things Done, and it is genuinely useful. But it only addresses the action side of decisions. It says nothing about the cost of deciding.
Roy Baumeister's landmark 1998 research on ego depletion, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, showed that willpower and decision-making draw from a shared mental resource.
The more decisions you make, the worse each subsequent one gets-not in quality necessarily, but in the effort required and the anxiety attached to it.
A 2011 study by Danziger, Levav, and Avnaim-Pesso, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, tracked over 1,100 parole hearings made by eight Israeli judges.
Approval rates sat at 65% right after a break and fell toward zero by the end of each session. Same judges. Same types of cases. Different point in the day. The variable was cognitive load.
The part most productivity advice misses is this: small decisions are often the worst offenders. They feel trivial, so you handle them all day without accounting for the cost.
By the time you reach something genuinely important at 4pm, you are choosing from a depleted state and you do not even know it.
Here is what I changed. I started front-loading decisions that required real judgment before 11am, and I built defaults for every recurring small choice I could identify. Not rules-defaults.
Things that happen automatically unless something genuinely unusual comes up. What I eat for breakfast. What I wear on days I am not meeting anyone.
Which type of task I open first. When I reply to messages. Having a default does not mean being rigid. It means you are not spending willpower on something that does not need it.
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A concrete example
A friend of mine, Marcus, runs a small design studio. He was constantly behind on client emails-not because he lacked time, but because he kept pushing them to "when he had energy."
That moment never came. We mapped out his day and found he was making roughly forty micro-decisions before lunch: which message to open first, whether to flag an email or reply now, what to work on between calls.
We cut that list down by assigning fixed responses to the most common situations. Routine client update? Reply before 9:30am, same format, two sentences. Invoice question?
Forwarded to his bookkeeper by default, no judgment call each time. Within three weeks he had cleared his inbox backlog and was finishing work an hour earlier. The work itself had not changed. The decision overhead had.
This shows up everywhere
In a 2012 Vanity Fair profile by Michael Lewis, Barack Obama explained why he wore only grey or blue suits: "I'm trying to pare down decisions.
I don't want to make decisions about what I'm eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make." Steve Jobs had the same logic behind his daily black turtleneck. These are extreme cases, yes. But the underlying principle holds at any scale.
A 2020 conceptual analysis in the Journal of Health Psychology by Pignatiello, Martin, and Hickman reviewed the decision fatigue literature and found consistent evidence that people who use predetermined responses for recurring situations report lower mental exhaustion and more confidence in their choices by end of day, compared to those who evaluate each situation individually.
The rules did not always produce better outcomes. But they consistently produced less regret and less depletion.
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The one thing worth taking from this
The two-minute rule tells you when to act. What it does not tell you is that the decision to act-or not-is itself a cost.
The goal is not to make faster decisions. It is to make fewer of them by deciding in advance what the answer is for anything that keeps coming up.
I am not sure this works for everyone. If you genuinely enjoy weighing options, forcing yourself into defaults will feel like losing something.
But if you end most days feeling worn out without a clear reason why, the invisible cost of small decisions is worth looking at.
This week: pick one decision you make repeatedly-same question, same context, roughly the same answer. Write down the default answer now. Put it somewhere visible. Let it run for five days without second-guessing it.
If you try it, I want to know what decision you picked. Hit reply and tell me-even just one line. I read every one, and the answers usually make the next issue better.
—Prompt N Productive