When we think about fatigue, we usually think of physical tiredness…we worked too hard in the yard, we didn’t sleep well the night before, or we’re working too many hours. Fatigue certainly includes those causes, but for many Christian leaders, or anybody for that matter, another kind of fatigue can rob our energy and diminish life and leadership effectiveness. It’s called decision fatigue. It refers to how the quality of our decisions degrades after a long string of successive decisions. In other words, the more decisions you make, the more the quality of those decisions declines.
Judges make less favorable decisions later in the day, and decision fatigue even affects consumer choices. So what might indicate that your decisions are affected by decision fatigue?
I’ve learned the effects of decision fatigue by experience.
Five years ago I began a new ministry as lead pastor of West Park Church in London, Ontario. It’s been a great ministry but I faced a staff shortage at that time. As a result, almost every staff person reported to me, which required me to make many more decision about ministry than I normally would. During the first year and a half, decision fatigue sometimes affected me.
Four indicators decision fatigue may be degrading the quality of your decisions.
- 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.
- 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 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.
- 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.
- 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 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 decision you are making, to what degree does decision fatigue affect you?
P.S. My upcoming book being released March 5 helps us deal with this challenge. It’s called Holy Noticing: The Bible, Your Brain, and the Mindful Space Between Moments. You can read more about it and get a free e-book here.
This article originally appeared here.
