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Freedom of Choice is Making You Miserable
The hidden cost of decision fatigue
We’re a couple days late to account for me taking a week to disconnect in Jamaica. Congrats Brit & Hayden 🥂
You have 16,320 configurations for hot coffee at Starbucks. That doesn’t include customizations, iced options, tea, the secret menu, going to the local place, making coffee at home, choosing between Keurig or Nespresso, switching to matcha cause you heard it’s better…
You get the point.
You used to have 2 options Folgers and Maxwell House. It came in the gross coffee pot your grandma had been using for 36.5 years and no one worried about it.
Today you make an average of 35,000 decisions everyday.
Some choice is better than no choice, endless choice makes you far less happy than you’d believe.
According to credible research, the more options you have, the harder it is to decide. You’re also less likely you are to be satisfied with your decision.
Decision Paralysis
In a study where people were asked to sample jams and then have the option to buy, the trial participants were 900% less likely to make a purchase when presented with more options (24 vs 6).
In a study of Vanguard mutual funds in employer sponsored 401k plans, every 10 additional funds offered decreased enrolment by 2%.
FOMO, buyer’s remorse and opportunity cost are all relatively new terms coined to explain this phenomenon.
Two things happened to affluent modern western society as this problem has developed over the last 100 years.
We’ve raised our expectations — if there is 175 choices of salad dressing surely one of them is out of this world!
We shifted the burden of wrong choices from the external world to our sense of self worth — if I make the wrong choice, it must be my fault.
One easy way to observe this in your own life: you likely feel a lot better after visiting a restaurant with a curated menu, instead of one with 150 options.
Willpower
Making decisions drains your willpower. It’s a finite resource you have everyday. Over time, decision fatigue will lead to worse decisions and worse self control.
There is a reason why famous CEOs wear the same things all the time. While it may seem like a trivial decision, those add up. Jeff Bezos has been quoted that the job of a CEO is to make just a few high quality decisions:
“three good decisions a day, that’s enough, and they should just be as high quality as I can make them.”
In a study of Israeli judges, the likelihood of approving parole requests declined steadily from ~65% at the beginning of the day, to almost 0% by the end.
The study also found that taking a break after a decision increased the likelihood of approving the next case, by ~35%.
All of these observations lead to further strengthen the idea of habits. Habits are the way we short-circuit decision making by setting our brains to autopilot to limit willpower drain.
Action Items:
Build habits to limit total numbers of decisions where practical.
Artificially limit your total choices in any one decision when presented with overwhelming options.
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