To learn about the curious
malady known as “decision fatigue,” I was given a very simple
assignment: Wear the same outfit and automate as many daily decisions as
possible for two weeks and write about whether it gave me more mental
clarity. That was it. Easy breezy. I jumped right in.
On Day 1, I picked out a crisp white shirt, got dressed,
opened the front door and promptly spilled coffee all over myself. The
first lesson of automating your wardrobe: Select dark fabrics.
“I get to wake up every day and help serve more than a billion people. And I feel like I’m not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my life.” —Mark Zuckerberg
By “automating your wardrobe,” I mean following the
fashion examples of Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and others whose jobs
demand a daily deluge of global-scale decision-making. The idea is
simple: To preserve brain space for the big calls, cut back on the less
significant ones, because the collective weight of your choices, layered
over and over each other, creates what psychologists call decision
fatigue. Officially, that’s the “deteriorating quality of decisions made
by an individual after a long session of decision-making,” says
Jonathan Levav, Ph.D., associate professor at Stanford University.
Colloquially it means reaching 4 p.m. and no longer giving a damn about the logjam of problems in your inbox.
You can’t always control the flow of the big questions,
but you can manage the small ones. Zuckerberg has a family and a
Facebook, and he tends to both in simple gray crew-neck T-shirts. (On
his first day back from paternity leave, he posted a photo of his
gray-on-gray closet and asked what he should wear.) Jobs was too busy
inventing the future to worry much about pattern-matching, so he stuck
with jeans and black mock turtlenecks. In a July profile, The New York Times
wrote that President Barack Obama—who wears only blue and gray
suits—daydreamed about retiring to Hawaii to open a T-shirt shop that
sold only one size (medium) and one color (white) with Rahm Emanuel, the
mayor of Chicago and his former chief of staff. When he and Emanuel
were faced with problems that had no conclusive answer, they’d turn to
each other. “White,” Emanuel would say. “Medium,” Obama would shoot
back.
“Making decisions uses the very same willpower that you use to say no
to doughnuts, drugs or illicit sex,” Florida State professor Roy
Baumeister, Ph.D., told The New York Times in 2011. “It’s the same
willpower you use to be polite or to wait your turn or to drag yourself
out of bed or to hold off going to the bathroom.” He explored this and
more with John Tierney in their book, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.
Levav and two other researchers conducted a 2011 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
that found Israeli judges paroled prisoners who appeared early in the
morning about 65 percent of the time, while those with late-afternoon
appointments were paroled less than 10 percent of the time. The
afternoon prisoners weren’t significantly different; they just showed up
when the judges were tired and therefore making the lowest-maintenance
calls.
Generally speaking, I have fewer problems than Obama,
Jobs, Zuckerberg, Israeli judges and most people on earth. But I do have
a wife, two energetic sons, a writing business and a daily grind.
I also love making decisions in the most convoluted manner possible,
which usually involves some combination of instinct, friend
recommendations, Yelp suggestions, Amazon testimonials, random Google
searches and several competing strains of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
(Recently I took two days to decide which NASCAR hat to buy.) There is
more data available to us now than ever before, and I do cannonball
dives into it.
I was intrigued to see whether eliminating the tiny, wee decisions (Am I feeling the BLT or the tomato basil soup?) would truly free up hard-drive space for the big ones. I dug in and made a plan, and then I spilled coffee all over it.
Invisible Forces
First I needed a new outfit.
This proved tricky. Deciding what to wear on a
garden-variety Tuesday is one thing; picking an outfit to which you’ll
be chained for two weeks introduces several new layers of commitment.
I considered my needs. I work from home, so on many days
my interactions are limited to baristas and the lunch crew at Amore
Pizzeria. I don’t need anything fancy, but I do need
adaptability—something suited for home and the coffee shop, lunches and
interviews, school registration and playgrounds. I also needed something
temperature-appropriate. (I wrote this during a murderous July heat
wave that inflated temperatures in my Indiana hometown from Comfortable
Low 80s to Surface of the Sun.) I also hoped to be reasonably
stylish—nothing sleeveless, no bracelets and no concert T-shirts,
although I did look preeeetty hard at my Guns N’ Roses shirt.
Once I started considering these questions, others began
bubbling up faster than I could swat them away: Should I wear button-up
shirts? Will I be too hot? Should I stick with short sleeves? Jeans or
shorts? I don’t like wearing shorts. If I wear shorts, does that mean
shoes or sandals? Am I a hard no on the Guns N’ Roses shirt?
Then it hit me: This was the exact sort of unending,
superficial, time-killing decision-making I was assigned to avoid. Four
minutes in and I was already slogging through an invisible decision
swamp about my outfit when I had specific orders not to.
“Let’s add to the mix the extensive pressure on women to uphold a flawless appearance…. These black trousers and white blouses have become an important daily reminder that frankly, I’m in control.” —Matilda Kahl
I stopped it cold and went full Zuck: gray crew-neck
T-shirt, jeans and a pair of Vans. It was versatile and inexpensive, and
no one would notice if I coated myself in coffee. I stacked a week’s
worth of outfits in my closet for easy morning access and did a hard
reset.
Routine Maintenance
When picking my official automated outfit, I realized an unsettling truth: I wear a lot of the same clothes anyway.
I’m a person of pleasant, arguably predictable, routine.
I use one brand of toothpaste and shop at the same supermarket. I
always order a burger with blue cheese and jalapeños at the local diner.
We’ve made a 12-hour drive to visit family down South for years, and I
find myself pulling into the same gas stations, grabbing to-go
sandwiches at the same restaurants. Even my subconscious, it seems, is more comfortable with the familiar.
I justify it as adhering to what I’m accustomed to, though the
skeptical could say, “Try some different cheese, dude.” When I told
friends about this assignment, they gave me a look that unmistakably
said, “This will not be your most strenuous challenge of 2016.”
In all likelihood, you’re in a routine, too. “Most
people have a fairly structured morning routine where they do the same
things, eat the same foods,” Baumeister says. “The human mind is well
set up to form habits and routines to conserve its energy.”
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