Make Fewer Decisions and Get More Done: How to Simplify Decisions in Business

If you feel like the million tiny decisions every day is the equivalent of a million tiny papercuts, you’re not alone—I’ve been there too. In this episode, we're talking about decision fatigue and I'm sharing the simple ways I use (and teach my clients) to make fewer, smarter decisions so we can all get more done. We're talking about simplifying processes, goals, and systems in planning, connecting, and selling so there's less overwhelm and more energy for the stuff that really matters.

3 Key Takeaways

--> Fewer goals = fewer decisions.

--> Simple systems beat heroic effort.

--> Decide once, then stop re-deciding.

Ready for ALL of this? Listen on!

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Transcript

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Welcome friends to this episode of uncomplicated business. What we are going to talk about this week is decision making, and the fact that you and I are both making about 6 billion decisions a day, and the decision fatigue that comes out of that, because, as a business owner, one of the biggest struggles I see with my people is making far too many decisions every single day forever. It's like having to decide every meal for every person we've ever met forever and what I'd like to talk about today are some really, first, why this is such a problem, and where you're feeling it and not even realizing it. 

And second, what some simple, straightforward kinds of approaches to simplifying this are, what some ways to reduce the amount of decisions you're making are so that it doesn't feel like you're constantly battling uphill, deciding and re deciding and undeciding and all of that. So to begin with, why is this such a problem? I think implicitly, you probably know, like in your gut, that decision fatigue is endless, and I know that for me, some of the way it shows up is that like I make decisions all day long, in my business, in my life, for my kids, for my family, for my husband, for my dad, for everyone, and then it gets to dinner Time, and I literally cannot make one more decision. People be like, what's for dinner? And it's like, that's the end of it. 

I cannot. It's bridged too far, because there have been so many decisions made all day long. It's where am I going to post this? It's what am I going to say? It's how am I going to help this client? It's DO I DO I offer this? It's, gosh, it's, how do I write this? Where do I write this? Why do I write this? Is now the right time to do it. How much do I charge for this? When do I charge for this? Did I do the invoice at all? I just discovered one that I missed. And like, you know, how do I reply to this email? How do I a million billion things all day long?

 And so what happens is, we only, there's lots of books and studies and all the things, but we humans only have so much capacity for this. We, you know, can do it endlessly, but not actually endlessly. And it does feel endless. And so if you are taking and you're wearing all the hats, and you're doing all of the decision making as a business owner, and then you're layering over top of that, all of the decision making of a, you know, independent human being, and maybe layering over the top of that, all of decision making for your children in your household, and laying over top of that, all of decisions for meals and what everybody's eating, and layering over top of that, whatever else you have going on, pets, extended family, yard work, gosh, everything. It's tiring to make all of those decisions, because each of them has its own kind of pressure, because every decision could be right or wrong or something else right, it feels like there's a 50,000 ways things can go wrong and one way to do it right. And if you have any perfectionist tendencies, or you're really just used to, like, I'm going to do this, it's going to work. Or you doubt, you get tangled a little bit. 

So a lot of decisions to be making all the time, all at once, and of course, sometimes you start spinning in circles, because it's like, just the mass of decisions becomes a lot to contend with, especially if your brain is like, well, was that one right, and was that one right, and what if that one was wrong? And does it then impact, then it becomes like, the if that one was wrong, then that one was wrong, then that one was wrong, and it cascades, and a lot of times that then looks like people getting stuck and frozen in place. It looks like stopping and restarting, because sometimes you just can't make one more decision. You know, I talked to a client earlier today, and we were talking about her onboarding process, and she said, Well, it's like this, we do this, and then we do this, and then they do that, and then we do that, and then we I counted 13 steps. And you know, for both her and the potential client, it was far too many steps and far too many decisions. And I said to her, like, you're, you're, you've got.

 To be exhausted by this process, because it's too much work for both sides. There's too many decisions that are being required of people, and it's hard to keep people going through that. It's hard to keep yourself going through that. And she was like, oh, but what happens is, in her case, this is a process that you know, started simply enough, five, 810, years ago, when she started her business. And over time, she inserted a step, and then she inserted a step, and then she inserted a step because they were steps she needed. But now she has 13 of them, and it's bonkers. And so for you, it's like, oh my gosh, where am I inserting decisions at an alarming rate that are making everything harder, right? So for me, processes with a lot of steps are a huge decision fatigue thing. Anytime you are deciding over and over and over again, the same kind of thing where you could just say, this is decided.

 Like, a good example of this is all of clients say to me, Well, I'm on a bunch of platforms, and every day I decide where to show up. No, no, you don't. That's far too many decisions. Like, we don't need to decide that every day or every couple hours, that's a nightmare. That's why you don't show up. That's too many decisions to be asking of your brain. It's like deciding every hour what snack you want. It's torture. But I somebody could just hand me a snack. I would eat it. Good. God. So it's more like, Okay, on Tuesdays, you show up on Facebook. On Wednesdays, you show up on LinkedIn and it just is right, the more we can make it so things just are, the easier doing them becomes. Does that mean it's always going to be easy? No. But can we reduce as much of the friction as possible to make it as easy to implement the thing, because we don't have to decide 10 things. Maybe we have to decide one, right? I my kids and my husband can kind of pick on me for this, but I literally cannot pick out clothes in the morning. I can't. I've never in my whole life been able to if I wake up in the morning and I don't have clothes for the next day picked out. I am stuck. I somebody else needs to come pick for me. And it's not like I'm wearing anything fancy. 

I'm wearing a sweatshirt and jeans today. I do it the night before because the morning of, it's like, one too many decisions for me already, and so I can't, like, account for the weather and what I'm doing that day, and think of all the factors that go into making that decision, but first thing the morning, I can't do it. I it just isn't and so I've learned that I have to make that decision in a different time, in a different part of my day with different amounts of information, but that in the morning, it's just simply not a decision I'm capable of. And it's not, you know, it's just timing. So sometimes it's the number of decisions, and sometimes it's when we're trying to decide. Like, have you ever tried to decide what to buy in the grocery store when you're hungry? Please come up with 42 packets of Oreos. It's great.

So if this is you, and you're like, This is me, this is all day long, and all I do is make 100 little decisions.
Little decisions and then question all of them over and over and over again.
I He, I see you,

I get it. And this all can be simplified. The processes you have in place probably have too many steps, I would say probably 50% more steps than you need. Likely all of those processes can be half as long, like my client that I talked to this morning, those 13 steps are going to be four, like it's it's not even going to be half. It's going to be less because it's far too many steps for everyone. But when we simplify things like this. Everything's less complicated. Everything gets easier. You're not as tired at the end of the day because you haven't made 62,000 decisions. Maybe you've only just made 62 and if we can bring the order of magnitude of decision making down, it gives you the space to make important decisions, to make intentional decisions, and also to just do the work that you're thinking about doing, instead of making 42,000 tiny decisions a day and not having any energy left. So a couple of things to think about. First, I think one of the enemies of decision making is goal setting. 

This sounds crazy, but it's it's not. What happens is, if you say to me, Sara, I have three big goals right now, you are setting yourself up for a decision problem, because those three goals are going to compete and you're always going to be LA. Like making a decision that you're going to question, because it that decision serves one goal and not the other. And so you're going to be like, Oh, shouldn't I be doing that thing over there? And then what happens is, you undecided, and then you re decide, and then you undecided, and then you re decide. So if you can clean up your goal to be a goal, and maybe it's just a goal for March, maybe it's just a goal for this quarter, maybe it's a goal for the whole year. 

Maybe it's a whatever, one at a time. I'm a big fan of one goal at a time, because the decision making competition is immediately reduced, and that really matters for you to be making progress efficiently. The second thing to think about is you there are systems in place in your business, in three areas that matter. They are in planning, they are in connecting, and they are in selling. For you. If you think, like, Okay, what's my system for planning? I don't know. Is there a system and is it convoluted? Does it take you, like, 10 minutes to write out, or are you like, I don't have a system for that. Both of those are impacting your decision making. What's your system for connecting and meeting new people and staying in touch with them? How many steps is it? How convoluted is it? And what's your system for selling? And you're like, Well, I don't have a system you do. 

What's the system that you've developed that you aren't even noticing and you're using? Well or not? I had a client actually last week say to me. I said, well, but you know, what do you normally do when you're trying to create more clients? And she was like, Oh, I because she'd like more students in her tutoring business. And she said to me, Oh, well, you know, every time I go share it in this place, in my local community, it always works. She's like, I just forget that's a thing.

 Okay, so that's a part of her system, but she doesn't have her system made implicit, like it's not or it's implicit versus explicit. It's not written out so that she can go up there's my system, right? And so she's having to re decide all the time, and that's that makes it hard. What are your systems do? A quick evaluation, what are your systems? Where are they too complicated? Where are they non existent? This, just as a side note, is what we do in the uncomplicating Business Lab. We build these systems, we build these processes, we evaluate them as we go, and then we keep them really simple, because this is the backbone of business. This is the foundational stuff. And you can be really far into business and success and have wonky foundational stuff, because it's just like the client I saw this morning, who's built her 13 step process over time. 

At a certain point, it's like way too many steps, and that somebody at five years or seven years, I think she might be 10 versus two. At year two, maybe you don't have a process, but you haven't developed it yet. At year 10, maybe you have a process that's like so over complicated that it needs it's just too many decisions either way. So that's the second thing. The third thing is, I'm a big fan of a short list versus a long list. I understand there's a place for brain dump lists, but your brain, on a day to day basis, cannot handle looking at that list, and neither can mine.

 Our job is to take the three most important things off that list and put them on our list for today, and then to close that notebook so that we don't overwhelm our brains, right? Anytime you can look at just today's portion of whatever thing you're going to do. Like, if you use my three offers a day system, it's all about making three offers, about three different things, or three things you work with, or three different places. But like, you don't look at the whole week all the time you look at today, because you already decided what you're offering today and where, and you just go do that. It doesn't matter that you're making 90 in a month, right? You just look at today, and that's true. 

So you can have a big, giant list, but it's a hard job to pick. You know, I tend to do it at the end of the day. I did this as a teacher too, like I would sit down at the end of the day and just write my like little tiny pick list for the next day and move on. That's part of your job is to keep a long list a short list. So are you using one or the other, and are you using them? Well, the last thing, and this is the killer that I think really helps decision fatigue, is not un deciding your decisions. For example, if you're like, I'm going to do a webinar, great. Pick a date, pick a time, be done, right? If you're like, I'm going to make this new offer, write it out, pick a price, be done. But do not then be like. Is this right? Do I want to start over? Is this the right day of the week? Is there a better time? Is there? Because that is the enemy of getting it done perfect. Is the enemy of done as they say, and relitigating our decisions isn't making progress, especially when you do it retroactively, or like, geez, man, I decided that, and now I think it was wrong, but I'm part way through it, right? 

All we can do is make the best decision we have we can with the information we have in front of us, and if we spend all of our energy reviewing those decisions and being mean to ourselves, we're using a lot of energy that we could be using to apply to current decisions, because we can't go make our old decisions over again. Maybe you did a webinar on a Monday last time, and it was kind of not as well attended as you'd like. And maybe this time you don't have to be like, that was the wrong decision. 

You have to be like, Okay, maybe this time I'll try Wednesday. Great. I all of the conventional wisdom says no Friday workshops. And I have a client who does workshops at one o'clock in whatever time zone she's in. She picks one o'clock Fridays, and she does amazing with them every time. So like, it was just a matter of that's what works for her and the people she works with, great, amazing. There's no right answer in so many of the cases in business that you deciding that just because it didn't work to plan you decided wrong isn't helping. So not relitigating your decisions and not beating yourself up for ones that weren't perfect is a huge part of reducing decision fatigue, and that's all being grounded in your power, your expertise, your ability to run a business, which we also do in the lab. So decision fatigue is a thing.

 I'm going to be talking more about it because I I just keep talking about it with my clients, and I think it's a big deal. There are lots of simple ways to reduce it, to make your day to day existence and business easier and more effective immediately. Without doing more, it actually is doing less. It's like making fewer decisions and you get further. It's amazing. If you need help with all of this, please come join us in the uncomplicating Business Lab. This is the place we are going to do all these things. We do that, and we do way more

. Because every month, like this month in March, the next guest on my podcast is the amazing Molly Gottfried, and she is both our guest expert in the lab this month, because we're going to talk about connecting without cringe, and she's the next podcast episode to talk about connection. 

We have all kinds of fun things to do in the lab, we are doing 51st states as a connection challenge next month in March or this month, really, because that's when this is coming out, and you're going to make 50 new connections without dating or stalking. So that's great as a business owner, a really worthy goal. Come play with us. You can find all the information in the links in the Episode Notes, and I will see you at the next episode. You'll get to hear from me and Molly, and we're talking about connection. I'll see you then bye.