While we often associate exhaustion with physical tiredness, many Christian leaders face a specific psychological drain known as decision fatigue. This phenomenon occurs when the quality of your choices degrades after a long sequence of decision-making. Essentially, the more choices you are forced to make throughout the day, the more your judgment and leadership effectiveness decline.
Research indicates that decision fatigue impacts everyone from judges making legal rulings to consumers selecting products. Recognizing the symptoms is the first step toward safeguarding your mental energy. So, what are the primary indicators that your choices are being compromised by this mental drain?
Through my own leadership experience, I have identified several key warning signs. Understanding these indicators will help you recognize when you are reaching your cognitive limit and allow you to adjust your routine for better clarity and impact.
Four indicators of decision fatigue may be degrading the quality of your decisions:
1. You make quick, impulsive decisions you later regret you made.
This happens because you want to quickly get one more thing off your plate and the quick decision seems to solve the problem. However, the real problem may be making the decision too quickly without sufficient information you need to make the best one.
2. You needlessly delay decisions.
This is the counterpoint to the impulsive decision. When we get mentally tired, we can easily put off a decision that needs to be made now. Sometimes I’d move an email into another folder that still required a decision from me that I could have easily made right then. By doing so I actually doubled the time I spent making the decision because I still had to read the email again to make the decision. By doing so, I took up two chunks of time and two chunks of mental energy.
3. You send thoughtless, terse emails.
I probably get 150 plus emails a day, many of them requiring a decision from me at some level. I’ve found that when I’ve had to make multiple decisions during the day, toward the end of the day I’m tempted to not think as clearly before I send an email. This post points out common email errors.
4. You get mad when someone asks you for a decision.
When this happens our mental chatter sounds like this. “Great, one more decision I have to make for somebody else!” The term ego depletion refers to the idea that self-control diminishes over time when we have already exerted lots of self-control. Toward the end of the day or a week when a leader has had to make too many decisions, he may find himself losing his cool more easily, flying off the handle, or saying thing things he shouldn’t.
As you look at the number of decisions you are making, to what degree does decision fatigue affect you?
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This article originally appeared on CharlesStone.com and is reposted here by permission.
