3 Ridiculously Simple Ways I Simplified My Life To Make Better Decisions
~ "Having only fruits and vegetables at home makes it easier to eat healthier"
Thursday night. I just ate a big bowl of rice and beans and I’m ready to relax before bed.
I open Netflix on the TV and start to scroll. 30 minutes later and I’m still scrolling.
It’s great to have an infinite catalog of movies and TV shows available 24/7.
The problem?
Too many options. It’s impossible to commit to one movie/TV show.
Sometimes I spend 30 minutes watching trailers so I can decide which 30-minute TV show to watch. It makes me feel stupid.
And this doesn’t happen only with small things in life. Things like diet, money, and relationships also make you choose between too many options.
Whenever I’m struggling to make decisions, I know I need to go back to the basics. And there are 3 ways you can do this too (so you make better decisions).
1. Make less decisions in your day to improve your decisions
It’s nice to wake up and decide:
What to wear
What to have for breakfast
How to get to work
What to do at work
If a PowerPoint graph should be corporate color #1 or #2
What to have for lunch
If you should start a new task 2 minutes before going home
What to eat for dinner
What to watch on Netflix
What to do at the gym
For me, the above is the definition of hell.
You wake up every day with a limited amount of good decisions you can make.
But 90% of people waste it on stupid things, like what to dress, what to eat, and whether they should respond to a stupid comment on social media.
Then when it’s time to make good (and important) decisions for their future self, they drop the ball. They don’t have enough willpower to choose what’s best for them, like:
To workout instead of Netflix
To eat vegetables instead of junk food
To go to bed at 10pm instead of watching TV shows until 2am
This is why I avoid wasting decision-making power daily on useless stuff. It leaves more fuel for the harder problems in life.
If you’re curious, here’s a list of things I do daily to avoid making too many decisions:
I’ve been having the same breakfast every single day. For 7 years. And I still absolutely love it. I can’t get enough of it. It’s one decision that removes a thousand others.
I use a single pair of shoes every single day. I also only have black and grey socks so I don’t have to worry about matching colors.
I watch one TV show at a time.
I (try to) read one book at a time (not very successful…)
I avoid the news. If something important happens, people around me are more than happy to talk about it.
I avoid social media, except if I’m trying to learn something
Remove options from your life if you want to start making smarter decisions.
2. Make it easy to choose the best decisions
I used to love to torture myself daily.
I have a problem with sweets. I know I can’t control myself if there’s a vegan Cadbudy chocolate bar in the kitchen. But for a long time I always made sure it was in my weekly grocery list.
At some point I realized how stupid it was. Here I was, trying to lose some weight, but also kicking myself in the leg by buying high-caloric food every single week.
You’re probably in the same boat as well. Trying to make better decisions, but making it very hard to resist the easier way out.
This is why you have to make better decisions easy to choose:
Having only fruits and vegetables at home makes it easier to eat healthier
Not having your phone next to you makes it easier to focus and get things done
Not having your phone next to you in bed makes it easier to not scroll TikTok until 1am and complain you “can’t sleep”
Pay attention to what you’re doing daily. If you want to improve your life, make that habit as easy and as smooth as possible to do. Otherwise you’re just making sure you will fail.
3. Identify what doesn’t add to your life and cut it out
Oliver Burkeman said in Four Thousand Weeks:
The technologies we use to try to ‘get on top of everything’ always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of the ‘everything’ of which we’re trying to get on top.
It’s easy to feel like modern life is about stacking responsibility after responsibility. And with tech, it’s much easier to pile on commitments without realizing you won’t be able to do everything.
So make life simpler.
Don’t commit to 3 different birthday parties on the same weekend. You know you won’t enjoy any of them because if you’re at #1, you’ll be looking at your clock thinking about #2 (and so on). Then you’ll try to solve that by checking your phone and texting people on the other 2 parties. You’ll end up on your phone trying to decide if the party you’re at is the best use of your time.
It’s the fastest way to feel miserable.
Pick one and enjoy the moment.
Accept you can’t do everything.
Life will become easier. An easier life means less choices. Less choices lead to better decisions. Better decisions make life easier.
What’s the most annoying thing I can help you with? DM me. I’m happy to help!
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I really appreciate this piece! It resonates with me on multiple levels. Especially the first two sections, regarding decision-making. Many people don't realize the magnitude of this psychological dilemma, individually and societally. So much so that it's been dubbed "decision fatigue"--the mental and cognitive exhaustion from having made so many decisions that your mental resources are depleted. As a result, you can't think clearly, nor can you make sound decisions.
Our world is so fast-paced and instantaneous that perhaps people assume endless decision-making is an inevitability. But there are things you can do to change it, at least in your own sphere. Exactly what you touched on here! Very useful advice; simple steps that anyone can take to improve their mindset. I will be keeping these in mind as I seek to declutter my mind :)