Elimating Decision Fatigue

seven ways I'm reducing the mental load

The list of decisions never seems to end. What to make for dinner. Which extracurricular activities we can commit to (and then, once we’ve committed, the logistics of how we are going to get everyone where they need to go). The technology we are going to give our kids access to. How I’m going to handle this situation or that nagging thought I can’t quite shake.

The mental load just seems to get heavier and heavier, and that’s before I’ve even looked at the news! Tired of being crushed under the weight of it, I decided to get serious about eliminating decision fatigue where I can.

The concept of decision fatigue isn’t new to me—I’ve heard about Steve Jobs and his daily uniform for years, and I’ve been a long-time regular listener of The Lazy Genius, who talks frequently about the Decide Once principle. But I’d never gotten serious about seeing where I could really elimate decision fatigue before. Now that I have, I’m seeing just how helpful it is.

Here are 7 ways I’ve eliminated decision fatigue that are helping me feel (at least a little) less crushed by the mental load:

• Morning Workouts: I have never been consistent with exercise. Despite my best intentions, life has always gotten in the way, and I’ve never found something that really worked for me. My 2026 word of the year is healthy, so I was determined to change that this year. When I took a hard look at my schedule, I realized there was only one consistent time I could commit to, and that was at 6:30 am,¹ after my husband and middle schooler have left for the day, but before my younger two (usually) wake up. Not only did this give me a consistent time, it also eliminated the “but when can I shower?” issue that cropped up when I tried to squeeze workouts into random slots of my day (this has derailed my workout plans more than I’d like to admit in the past). Now I work out in the morning, shower, and get ready for the day. I have done 50 workouts so far in 2026,² one every weekday. This is the most consistent I have ever been with workouts in my life, and eliminating the decision of when to work out has made a huge difference.

• Morning Workouts, Part 2: The other thing that is making my morning workout routine successful is that I get an email every Sunday from Nourish Move Love with a (free!) workout plan for the week. I don’t have to figure out what to do—I just click the link for that day in the email. I’ve been on the NML email list for years, and enjoyed the handful of random workouts I’d done, but getting rid of the need to choose a workout by following her weekly plan has been an absolute game-changer for me.

• Recipe Binder: I’ve said for a long time that I don’t love to cook, but I’ve realized that it’s not the actual cooking part that I truly dislike. It’s all the decisions that go with it: first there’s figuring out meals that everyone in our house will like and will work with our difficult dinner schedule—this requires so many decisions, especially with the infinite choice of recipes the internet provides. Then there’s the grocery shopping, which also comes with plenty of decisions. I’m exhausted by the process before I’ve even gotten to cooking! So, I’m working on eliminating some of the decisions by cooking excluively from recipe cards.³ Cookbook recipes, Pinterest recipes, recipe reels—wherever the recipe comes from, it’s going on a recipe card before I make it. No distractions from my phone, no scrolling through insanely long blog posts to get to the actual recipe, no forgetting which website or cookbook the recipe was from when it’s time to cook. I can take the recipe card with me to the grocery store, and it’s right there on the counter if I need to start dinner and my husband needs to finish it. If a recipe doesn’t work for our family, the card can go in the trash.

  

• Carpool Creativity: I typically sit in the carpool line for 10-15 minutes before it starts moving and I reserve this time for something creative. Most often, I pull out my watercolor pencils and some watercolor paper and draw for a few minutes. Sometimes I’ll write. What I do doesn’t really matter, as long as it’s something creative! It’s so easy for creativity to get put on the back burner, because there is always something on my to-do list I could be doing, but having a few minutes of my day set aside for it makes a huge difference.

  

• Friday night pizza night: This one is pretty self-explanatory, but it’s fantastic to have one super-easy dinner a week where everyone knows what to expect!

• No Screens on School Days: My kids don’t love this one, but before we implemented this, I spent way too much energy trying to figure out screen time during the week. I tried to implement complicated systems, that—surprise—didn’t work. This is simple and clear and elimates me having to decide when I’m going to say yes to to screens.

• Using the Todoist app for chores: This is certainly not a new concept, but having certain chores assigned to certain days makes it easier for me to keep up with them. However, it can be hard to remember the ones that don’t need to happen every week! I add them to the app, schedule how often I want to do them, and then when they need to be done, they automatically pop up on my to-do list. Once I’ve added a chore to the app, I don’t have to think about when to do it anymore, plus, I get the satisfaction of checking the chores off the list!

These seven things are making a huge difference in my life, and I’m looking for more ways to eliminate decision fatigue! So, I want to know: how have YOU elimated decision fatigue and what kind of difference is it making in your life? Or what’s an area of life where you are struggling with decision fatigue? Tell me about it in the comments!

1. Turns out all the morning workout evangelists were onto something.

2. Shoutout to my accountability buddy, Laura—we send each other the 🏋️‍♀️ emoji when we’ve finished our workouts, and she’s the one who realized I’d hit the 50 milestone!

3. I had dozens and dozens of recipes written on recipe cards or clipped from magazines spread out between two unorganized recipe boxes, a recipe binder, and a gallon-size Ziploc bag. Not to mention the stack of cookbooks and hundreds of pinned recipes. It was too much! It felt so good to organize my mess of recipes, toss the ones that I had duplicates of or that I knew my family wouldn’t like, and condense them all into the binder. I’ve had a recipe binder for years (it’s old, so not the exact one linked—by the same company, though), but I didn’t have enough page protectors which had kept me from organizing the binder. I’m not sure why it took me so long to get more page protectors, becaue they only cost me $6, and I now have a much more organized recipe situation!

*Some links may be affiliate and earn me a few extra pennies at no cost to you! As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.