You're making too many decisions.

You've been staring at that cupcake for the last two minutes... weighing the options of whether you want it bad enough or whether you should be healthy and leave it alone. The inner CPU of your brain is spinning and calculating. Burning calories as you get closer to making a decision here. Finally, you decide and life moves on. But next week, you'll be back. And there in that coffee shop, another cupcake will sit up and face you. You'll run through the same options, and weigh the same pros and cons. And you'll make the decision all over again.

Each and every decision you make takes energy and most of them don't matter. At least not in those particular instances. Add to this how stressful the really big decisions can be with health, family, home, work, and that damn faucet that keeps splashing water in your face at work. You're stressed enough as it is.

These cupcake decisions aren't helping you.

Pawn Stars

Let's look closer at decision-making, have you ever watched Pawn Stars? It's a show about pawn brokers who get to bargain for wild and exotic items that come through their Las Vegas store. Coins, movie memorabilia, and even old cars. Each item is a decision that will cost them or make them money. Ranging from the trivial to the outlandish. George Washington's coat to giant 30ft tall fire-breathing machines. It gets odd.

Their process is a study in how to make decisions. Which fall into two categories, strategic thinking and situational thinking. Situational thinking happens in the moment, based on experiences and from observing cues and emotions. Strategic thinking happens ahead of time, from the comfort of your armchair. This latter category helps you determine a framework or conditions for making decisions in the future. Both are vital to your survival, let me be clear there. But there is a cost to making every decision in the moment.

Rick Harrison and his family at Pawn Stars are great situational thinkers, their years of experience and ability to read people allows them to price things in the moment. But they cannot stand up to the sheer variety of items that pass through their store. So they have built a strategy.

They use experts and transparent valuations to help them make solid decisions. It goes like this...

The expert sets a price
They do this in front of the customer
...and from there they'll bargain for a deal that gives them a profit margin.
This strategy helps decide for them, what the maximum price is going to be.

The fun thing is that they sometimes screw themselves over, they miss out on huge bargains when the client learns the true value of their piece. But that tradeoff is factored in. Rick decided ahead of time that this tradeoff works for them. What's the saying in Vegas... the house always wins?

Here is a sillier example about t-shirts...

Silly decisions

credit: Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg)

Mark Zuckerberg the founder of Facebook has a wardrobe filled with the exact same clothes. He can surely afford some variety there but chooses not to. Mark said in an interview that his boring wardrobe means less decisions to make. While certainly odd, he also just shifted his dressing decision completely out of situational thinking into strategic thinking. For him, dressing in the morning is one less thing to worry about.

I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible...
-- Mark Zuckerberg

Over several months, you'll be faced with dozens of decisions like your cupcake. You could make each of those decisions in the moment and use your situational thinking. Just like you could buy your toilet rolls one at a time from the convenience store, at marked-up prices. When you find yourself repeating the same types of decisions, you can get creative. Move them into a framework, ahead of time. Decide when a cupcake is ok and when it is not okay. A strategy like -- cupcakes are only okay on Tuesdays. Making one strategy to account for all those decisions. Instead of convinience store shopping, you're in the wholesale game, buying bulk with discounted prices.

Credit: Midwit Meme

It takes energy to make decisions and you're only human, so focus on the things that matter and don't hesitate to use frameworks or pre-made decisions for the rest. Sit down, take a breath, and bake some pre-made decisions for your future. You’ll live longer with less decision fatigue.