Decision fatigue: what the research really says, and how to make fewer decisions

The term usually describes a familiar end-of-day state: you've made decisions all day at work, and now choosing what to eat, which flight to book or whether to reply to a message feels disproportionately hard. You procrastinate, default to whatever is easiest, or make choices you later regret.

In personal life this shows up as a pile of small, unresolved choices: which gift, which contractor, which weekend, which gym class. None is difficult on its own. Together they take up a surprising amount of attention.

The idea grew out of research on self-control. In 1998, Baumeister and colleagues proposed that self-control draws on a limited resource that can be temporarily depleted, an effect they called ego depletion. A 2008 paper by Vohs and colleagues reported that making a series of choices reduced people's performance on later self-control tasks.

Those findings have since been challenged. In 2016, a large preregistered replication carried out across many laboratories and published in Perspectives on Psychological Science found an ego-depletion effect close to zero. Researchers still debate why, and whether the effect exists under some conditions.

So it is fair to say that the strong version, a fixed daily supply of willpower that every decision uses up, is not well established. What isn't in doubt is that decisions take time and attention, that unresolved choices keep pulling at your mind, and that choosing tends to feel harder when you're tired or overloaded.

You don't need the research settled to act on this. These approaches reduce the number of choices you face without lowering the quality of your life.

Delegating a decision isn't giving up control. It's choosing in advance how a kind of decision should be made.

Delegation helps most when the same kinds of decisions keep coming up and you have clear preferences that someone else could learn. The first few times, you'll explain what you like. After that, a good assistant or concierge should need much less from you.

It makes less sense if you enjoy the choosing, or if your preferences change every time. In that case, delegate the research and keep the decision.

This is how SuperHandled works. Your Personal Concierge learns your preferences, researches options, and brings you a recommendation with the reasoning. Anything that costs money or commits you to something happens only with your approval, within rules you set.