In recent times I’ve heard and read a lot about our capacity to make decisions. When you have a think about it, you’ll realise that everyday you have a certain amount of ‘head space’ to make decisions. We make decisions every day of our lives – whether the decision of what to eat for breakfast, to deciding which direction to travel to work, to deciding a particular strategy or plan at work, to deciding what to do for date-night, to deciding where to go on holiday, to deciding which cereal to buy, or deciding what do do with your weekend. 

If you’re anything like me, sometimes by the time I get to the end of the day, the last thing I want to do is make another decision. I have been making decisions all day, big ones and small ones, and so at the end of the day I’ll try to avoid making decisions to save some energy, ask others to make decisions for me, or just put off the decision making for another time. Because by that point of the day, I had used up my decision making space in my head.

One thing I’m learning to do is consider which are the important decisions to make, and which don’t need to be made. This is where habits come in. The more habits we have in our lives, the less decisions we need to make – if we are in the habit of working out first thing on a Monday morning, we don’t need to decide to work out on a Monday morning, we just do it. 

Observing some known people around the world, you can see how some of them have built habits into their lives in order to save their decision-making-space for the big decisions, not the unimportant ones. Take a look at Leo Widrich – this guy founded ‘Buffer‘. He is known to not only wear the same outfit each day, as well as eating the same dinner 6 days a week. By owning 5 of the same white t-shirts, he doesn’t need to make the decision each day on what to wear. By eating the same healthy meal each day, he doesn’t need to make the annoying decision each night of what to have for dinner. Therefore, he’d have more space to think about the bigger decisions in his life.

When I first heard about this guy, in honesty I just found it so random and hilarious. “How could somebody wear the same clothes everyday!?”. But after that I took some time to think about it and can understand the benefits of doing that, and some principles that are pretty cool. Not wasting effort or time on small insignificant decisions (whatever they may be in your life), but giving our key energies and efforts to the decisions that are important, whether at work, or (more importantly) the decisions impacting our family and friends. 

What daily decisions do you make that you could change into habits to save you decision-making-space in your head? What do you think about Leo Widrich’s way of doing things, genius or just a little too odd?