Welcome back to the show. I’m so glad that you’re here. This is Episode 171: Reducing Daily Decisions. I’m really excited to share about this topic right now because in my Decluttered online masterclass that started a couple of weeks ago, we are talking a lot about decision-making and about getting clear on what matters.

A couple of the suggestions that I share in this episode are things that I experiment with in my course all the time. I invite my groups to participate in and they really make a difference in the way you think about your life in the way you have more energy and ability to make better decisions because you’re making fewer decisions.

Fewer decisions equal more power, more time, more energy, more enjoyment in your life. This episode, the bulk of it was a bonus episode that aired over two years ago in my Podcast Plus Patreon group. So, I’ve pulled it out of the archives because it’s so uplifting. As I was listening to it, there’s a couple of things that you’ll note timewise.

I mentioned working on my minimal meal planning course will that course I’m happy to say, has been finished, completed, and launched. So that’s available in the world. I’ll link it in the show notes. It’s called Seven Days, Seven Dinners, and it’s a fantastic, very low price. It’s only $17. It’s a very accessible option.

Jumping on board with my minimum meal plan, I will say one of the greatest time savers and energy savers of my last few years. This morning, I was working on our new minimum meal plan. We rotate ours every three months to have a seasonal plan. And I, we did the activities this morning with my kids.

We brainstormed around the kitchen table for breakfast, and I’ve been working on the rest of that process this afternoon, so that I’m ready to go. I also, as I was listening back to this bonus episode, recognized some of the things that I was doing well with a couple years ago, that possibly because of the pandemic, I think this came out right before the pandemic began.

Things have shifted a little bit, and it was a good reminder for me to get back on track with some of the suggestions that I share with you. So just so you. You know, in solidarity, I’m working on these things while I am sharing them with you for my segment today, I wanted to share a quick, magical adventure moment.

Segment: Magical Adventure Moment

When my family was in Paris over Christmas time, I planned lots of different adventure type activities. One of these was a chocolate and sweets tour. We walked to eight different chocolate and sweets shops. In each one, we learned a little bit of the history of the shop, the location, and the pastry who had come up with this idea? Where did it originate?

What are the ingredients? How do they use it? It was a fascinating tour, fun to do with our kids. And there was one stop will just be cemented into my memory because it was so surprising. We almost walk straight past the shop. And then our guide turned on her heel and said, oh, we need to go in here.

We need to taste a Merveilleux. I’m not saying that correctly. I’m quite certain. We walked into this little bakery. If you can call it a bakery. Most of the things in there while they were baking some like focaccia looking breads, but we were there for the merveilleux, which are like, pieces of fluffy sweet cloud.

That’s how I can describe this to you. This is made up of a circular about two-inch circle base of soft meringue freshly baked meringue wrapped in Chantilly cream, whipped sweet, whipped cream. And there’s also a little ball of meringue on top. So, it’s like a meringue and cream sandwich.

They look like little domes. In fact, when I first saw them, I assumed that they were marshmallow. They’re little domes, and once they formed the meringue and the cream and the meringue and the cream to enrobe it, then they roll it in a topping. It can be a crunchy, brittle, it can be shaved chocolate. It can be little dehydrated, cherry flavoring.

There were a few different types of few different colors and flavors. And the first bite was a shock because why are I expected some sort of give, it was little. Melting my teeth into a cloud, soft and sweet. There was no crunch. Even that meringue was just like disappeared and dissolved in my mouth. It was so delightful.

The sensation of eating it was as delightful as the flavor itself and fascinating. I’d never heard of it before. When I think about going to Paris, I think about eating delicious Macarons and croissants, you know, what comes to mind. It became our favorite spot or favorite memory from the tour.

Almost missing this little shop and then ducking in ordering one of each flavor coming out and popping them in our mouths to just, just to have them disappear and melt.

I looked around everyone had the same reaction of just utter surprise and delight at how delicious and fun and unexpected these treats. It was this moment on the street, eating these treats that reminded me of everything that I love about adventure and travel and going new places and discovering new things that sensation of something totally unexpected and totally wonderful happening.

And it was even better that I got to share it with my family, that my friends is today’s magical adventure.

Now let’s dive into the episode, enjoy reducing your daily decisions.

Reducing Daily Decisions

Decisions are all around us. And it is so important that we have a little bit of perspective and understand that we have a lot more power when it comes to what types of decisions we make, how often we make them and what we decide, then we think that we do. So, in this episode, I want to offer you five specific tips for reducing your daily decisions and the worksheet that accompanies this episode, we’ll have places for you to make these decisions.

Either as you listen, if you are not in a, you know, you’re not running or driving a car, if you’re sitting down and you can fill out the worksheet as you go, you could do that pause after each tip and just put some thought into it and fill it out. Or you could simply fill it out after you listen.

If you need to refer to the episode to get some ideas or to kind of jog your memory, that’s totally fine, but know that there is a PDF worksheet that you can download that accompanies this episode, where you can start putting into practice the tips that I’m going to share with you today.

I want to start off by telling you a funny story. Um, you know, this is not like one specific story. It is a series of a lot of different times throughout the last well, thirteen years that Dave and I have been together that we wanted to go out to eat, and this doesn’t happen as much anymore, but it used to happen frequently that we will be ready to go out to eat.

We would either have planned on a date for a date night or, you know, early in our dating years when we were just kind of hanging out and it was time to eat. And so, we decided, okay, let’s go get something. And I could not figure out what I wanted to eat. And this is so funny, especially for me because I consider myself a quick decision-maker.

 I feel like I, I know what I like, and I don’t have a lot of problems coming up with new ideas. And so, the fact that I could make all these good decisions all day long about different things, creative projects, work school, my kids, and then it would come time for dinner, and I would totally blank out.

And it wasn’t even like blank. It was feeling like a stupor. Like I would think, what do I want to eat? Where should we go eat? And I could not conjure up any image at all? In my mind of like what this was going to be, this is such a simple thing. I could not ever figure out what I wanted to eat.

And sometimes I would choose something. Okay. Well, let’s just go to Panera. Let’s just go and grab something quick at Panera and we would sort of like start getting ready and get in the car. And I would be questioning the decision because I hadn’t felt very good about it in the first place. And I would come up with all the reasons why that was maybe not the best decision.

Like, well, maybe they don’t have as many healthy options or maybe it’s a little more expensive that I want, or maybe we want to do something a little, you know, if it was a date night, like maybe we want to do something a little fancier than that. So not only would I not have an easy time making the decision, but then I would question the decision that I made repeatedly.

It, what ended up is that I started just telling Dave, please don’t make me make this decision. I do not care where we go, but I just cannot make another decision. Like I am done making decisions today.

Have any of you ever felt like that? You know, it’s so funny when you get to the point, it almost nothing matters anymore. We could go to Panera, he could have taken me to McDonald’s, and I wouldn’t have cared because I was out of decision-making energy and we all have felt this way before in our lives.

We’ve gotten to the point, whether it’s in a kind of a turbulent time where we’re having to make a lot of seemingly important decisions at once, or simply just at the end, sometimes the middle of a day, we will run out of decision-making energy.

And at that point, from that point on, we can’t really trust the decisions that we make to be very wise from that point on. We don’t have the clarity or the willpower necessary to make decisions that are really aligned with the life that we want to lead. Now, why is it important to know this? This phenomenon is called decision fatigue.

Decision Fatigue is Real

I’m sure you’ve heard about it. I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about it. Even several of my podcast’s episodes in the Live Free Creative Podcast talk about this idea. And even in my book, More Than Enough, I mentioned the idea of decision fatigue. The reason that it is so important is that we can do so much to reduce the amount of decision and decision fatigue that we have by eliminating unnecessary decisions.

Eliminating unnecessary options. We put ourselves back in a place in our lives where the decisions that we make are reserved for the things that matter and the things that don’t matter that much, or that we can kind of put-on repeat or plug into our schedule on a regular basis.

Automating Tasks or Routine Decisions

I like to call this automating some of our tasks, automating the types of things that come up normally in our regular schedule that we can count on.

This reduces our having to spend any of this precious creative decision-making energy on things that we can decide once and then not have to worry about. Again, it may sound backwards, the idea of reducing decisions or eliminating decisions, because I think as a people, we like the idea of variety. We like the idea that we have lots of options available to us that the world is our oyster.

In theory, that idea is wonderful. Anything you want to do or wear or eat is available to you at any time. But what that does in our brains is just cause a lot of overwhelm and confusion. Our brains like to look for things that are familiar and things that are comfortable and all the extra processing that it takes.

Every time we give our brain an additional option starts to really wear it down. In my podcast episode about becoming a better decision maker I shared an example that I want to share again, because I think it’s interesting.

When I was building a house in Texas, my sister was concurrently remodeling a house in Salt Lake City, Utah. Such a fun experiment because our experiences were so different, even though our styles are similar and even things like our budget were similar, the options available to us were vastly different.

We were building our house using a building company, and we chose from a specific list of options. Our floor plan came from a list of options. We could adjust it a little bit, but mostly we had this narrow list of options within all the design details, the flooring, the cabinets, the cabinet colors, the hardware, the lighting, the tile in the bathrooms, all these things were not from the wide world wide web.

This huge, you know, anything is possible. They were from a specific list. Available options. I never felt constricted in this process, except for the lighting. I did end up changing a lot of my lighting out after we moved in. But as far as like the tile and the cabinets and all those things, the hardware, they were great. The available options were great. So, there was no reason to look outside of those for what I chose.

My sister, because she was not building through a specific building company, she was remodeling an existing home with unlimited options. She was making some of the same decisions about tile, about hardware, about cabinets, about floor plan and layout.

But because her options were unlimited, it was so much more difficult for her to make decisions. Unlimited options lead to limited decision-making possibilities and unlimited amounts of energy that could be spent on choosing the tile or a piece of hardware or a color for a wall. This process was so interesting to watch.

I had to make all the decisions while Dave and myself, we had to make all the decisions about our house within about a three-week time. We went into the design center a couple of times. Chose everything all at once.

Luckily, I had done some, you know, mood boarding and things, so I wasn’t totally unprepared when we walked in, but we made all the decisions in about three weeks and six months later, we moved into our brand-new house that had been built from scratch.

About a year later, my sister was finishing up her remodel. So, we made all our decisions and moved in in about the same amount of time that it was taking my sister with these unlimited options and possibilities to make her decisions. And then her remodel finished up much later than that. It’s such an interesting example of how.

More possibilities don’t necessarily mean better possibilities. And that we get, when we give ourselves more variety or more choices, sometimes we can be doing ourselves a disservice rather than a service. I want to share these next five tips for reducing your daily decisions. And the reason that I think it’s important to reduce daily decisions that come up all the time, every single day, we make some of the same types of decisions when we reduce those to a very simple set of personal decisions. These personal guidelines then free up our decision-making energy for things that matter for the areas of life, where we do want to have a lot of variety. You can love variety and not need to have it every single minute of every single day. You can love variety and choose to experience that newness in a couple areas of your life with the background serving sort of like a baseline of what’s expected and what’s normal.

Then the things that are novel and new and fun feel different rather than having every single decision you make, having to be something new and different every time that’s just exhausting.

So, let’s dive into these five tips for reducing your daily decisions.

Tip 1: Eat The Same Thing Daily

The first one is one of my favorites, because this is something that I’ve been focusing on for several years. And in fact, I’m creating a course right now, all around the idea of eating the same thing every day. You probably have heard me talk about it a little bit, whether through my minimalist mealtime podcast, or if you’ve read my blog, I have a whole blog about minimalist meal plans, but in this tip, I want to offer.

You know, it, it is a stretch for some people to think about eating the same thing for dinner every night. But for most people it’s not a stretch to consider eating the same types of things for breakfast and lunch. Now you can do this a couple ways. One can be to create some sort of a meal plan where, you know, on Mondays for breakfast, you eat eggs and toast and on Tuesdays you eat oatmeal and on Wednesdays you eat.

I don’t know, yogurt and granola, whatever it is. But what I want to offer is the suggestion that you at least experiment with eating the same thing. The exact same thing every day for at least a few days in a row, or even a couple of weeks in a row to just give it a try.

We might find when we experiment with some of these ideas that we enjoy the consistency and that, that not only makes it easier to decide what to eat, because we already know it also makes it easier to shop. It also makes it easier to be healthy because we’ve already chosen.

So, I want to refer you to your worksheet, where I give you a couple different layouts here for you can choose a couple meals that you want to put on. Repeat, uh, I suggest choosing one breakfast and one or two lunches and to eat those on repeat for the next two weeks, whether it’s every single day or every couple of days.

And now here’s where we get into this idea that you could have a little bit of variation on a day, like a random day, like a Saturday or a Sunday, where you want to spice things up a little bit, or have like a big, special breakfast with your kids or something like that.

But if you give yourself a baseline. I eat eggs and toast every day for breakfast or for a lot of people. What’s interesting is a lot of people do this anyway, just without the intention piece without having decided. So, they’re still making the decision, but then they just make the same decision. So, what this does is choosing to eat the same thing for breakfast and or lunch every day eliminates the need to make the decision because you already know.

You’re ready to go. You don’t have to think twice about it. So, think about this and you know, the other thing is too, when you’re making these decisions, you can spend a little bit of time making a good one. So be realistic about your timeframe, about your budget and about your nutritional needs, but you know, choose to eat something that you enjoy and that is simple and that is nutritious. and put that on repeat for a couple of weeks and see how that feels to just know what you’re going to eat for breakfast or lunch, every day.

The course that I’m creating is called Seven Days, Seven Dinners. And it’s about using the same idea, but for your dinners as a family, and it will have lots of insights and worksheets and ways to get your kids involved.

I’m also including some of my favorite recipes and shopping lists to just make the process even easier. That plan refers to more my minimalist meal plan, where you choose the same seven meals and put those on repeat. But today for this tip, I want you to choose one or two meals and put them on repeat every day for the next couple of weeks.

See how that goes. And I would love to hear back, find me on Instagram and send me a message or share in your Instagram story and tag me so I can see how it’s going to eliminate your decisions surrounding what you eat for breakfast and lunch for the next couple of weeks.

Tip 2: Create A Mini Capsule Wardrobe

The next one is also similar, of course, because this is all about reducing our decisions.

Tip is to choose what to wear from a limited wardrobe. There are a couple ways that you can do this one way is to edit your entire wardrobe, create what’s called a capsule wardrobe or an edited lifestyle wardrobe, where you only have in your closet, the things that fit that you love and that you want to wear regularly.

This will probably dramatically reduce the amount of clothes that you have. I know most people are hanging on to things that they don’t wear don’t really love at, or that don’t fit very well just for the sake of having them because they bought them. Eliminate your unnecessary clothing or the things that you don’t love or don’t fit very well.

Do this through your whole wardrobe, or you can do something that I like to call a mini capsule wardrobe, and you could do this at the beginning of each week or at the beginning of a month, or even at the beginning of a season, choose that your favorites for that week and for a week, you know, seven days it maybe 15 items or less, including tops, bottoms, dresses, and shoes, of course, outerwear and exercise where, you know, are beyond this, but just choose a few things to mix and match.

And it’s so fun to dramatically reduce the clothes options that you’re choosing from for a time. I would just pull these things out and move them to a different section of your closet or kind of move everything over so, you just have like you, your mini wardrobe in one little area. You can even go as far, and I’ve done this and loved it. Pre-planning so in your planner or on a piece of paper, write down, looking at those items that you’ve chosen, write down what you’re going to wear each day.

You know, maybe you want to look at the schedule and see if you have any meetings or any specific activities that would warrant a different type of outfit, but writing down what you’re going to wear and choosing ahead of time and even, you know, laying those things out is easy. It’s so simple.

And it dramatically reduces the amount of decision fatigue that we have in our lives. In fact, creating a capsule wardrobe was one of the very first experiments that I did with minimalism. And it’s something that I’ve continued to do. Seven years later, I’ve been using a small capsule wardrobe of about 50 to 60 items since 2013.

And some of those things have changed out as you know, they’ve worn out completely. The climate of where I’ve lived has changed a little bit, but I still have things in my closet that I’ve been wearing for seven years, because I love them that much. So, this is a really easy way to reduce the number of decisions that we make daily.

There are so many examples in the media about really, you know, incredible people. Steve Jobs is one that comes to mind, most fashion designers that I can think of where a unit. They literally wear the same type of thing every day, a black t-shirt and black jeans or blue jeans and a white button up. You could go so far as doing this.

If you want to just really know what it is that you want to wear. And then put that on repeat and the key to all of this about eliminating our daily decisions is to not feel bad that we have decided to not decide. We’ve decided to put something on repeat but celebrate and how amazing it feels to already know to not have to choose again, but to already know what we want.

Tip 3: Set Phone Reminders for Tasks

The third tip that I have for you today is to set reminders on your phone for things that you want to do. But you forget about this helps you to not have to be constantly managing things in your brain. I was listening to a podcast earlier today and I loved what one of the speakers said.

He said, our brains are not meant to be storage devices. They’re meant to be processors. So, where you can think of like a hard drive on your computer as a storage device, that computer. Processor is not meant to store anything. The storage must go somewhere else. And one place that most of us usually have on hand almost.

We almost feel attached to it as our brain is our phone. So rather than trying to remember all the things that you want to do, and then having to figure out when in the day you you’re going to do them set a reminder on your phone. So, your phone can. Your brain examples of this might be to drink 12 ounces of water, or to go on a quick walk, or maybe you need a reminder to sit down and eat your lunch, whatever it is that.

Enable you to not have to try to think of all the things that you need to do, but to have them told to you by your little digital assistant, when you need to do them, this is something that I’ve implemented with my block scheduling in my own life. That is so nice. I have alarms on my phone that tell me when to wake up, when to leave my house, to walk the kids to school.

When to eat lunch. And that usually means that’s my transition time from my home business, into my work business. And so, I will, you know, finish up whatever I’m doing at home folding laundry or cleaning the floor have lunch. And then I go to work. I have the same type of schedule after work. So, at three 30, that’s when I wrap up my work hours and I head home so that I can meet the kids at the bus stop.

I have a reminder that tells me when it’s time to get the kids ready for bed and kind of set-in motion, our bedtime routine. And then I have a reminder at 9:45 that tells me it’s time to get in bed, just knowing. My phone or watch is going to tell me when I need to do those things. Eliminates my decision every single day, multiple times a day.

That’s like six alarms. Those are times that I don’t have to think about what comes next. I already decided. And so that is just a reminder to keep me on track for the things that I already know. I want to do such a powerful tool. And I think we use our phones for a lot of things that are distracting and maybe not as positive, but choosing to use your phone to keep you on track for the life that you want to lead is a positive way to use it.

Tip 4: Schedule your Online Time

Tip number four is to schedule your online time. It’s true that in our physical world, that we have a lot of decisions that we can make. You know, if you’re sitting at home on the couch, maybe you’re trying to decide whether you should pull the laundry or whether you should clean the floor or whether you should read a book or whether you should take a nap or whether you should get up and go outside to pull some weeds.

Those decisions are multiplied infinitely when we get online, because not only do we have access to what’s right in front of us, but we also have access to. Everything that’s in front of anyone anywhere when we schedule our online time and reduce it rather than having these sorts of quick checks all day long that we respond to an email, we respond to a direct message.

We respond to a Marco Polo. We have notifications, pinging and dinging all day long, rather than having to be a slave to the notifications on our phone and to the things that might be changing out there in the world all the time. We can decide and give deliberate attention to what we want to do online at specific times of day.

For me, that is looked like having some strict guidelines for myself around my phone use. And I want to do this even further right now. I don’t get on my phone until 9:00 AM. I do a quick check around 9:30 to 10:00 AM. I get online around 12:30 to one when it’s the beginning of my work hours.

And then I might get. Again, around 8:30, right before I’m getting myself ready for bed. I try to only answer work emails, like only get on my computer to do emails during my work hours, which are 1230 to three 30 every day. And then around that, I allow myself to, you know, communicate with people. Call my mom or my sisters use the Marco Polo app to stay in touch with friends.

But I’m really working on this one, myself to not have all my sort of in-between filler time be spent online. Now, just as, as a side note, one thing that has been really helping me with this, when I have that little sort of in between time, like maybe there’s 10 or 15 minutes here or there that I don’t have something planned to do or something took a little less time or I’m kind of stuck somewhere.

I have started carrying a book with me everywhere I go in my bag. I also have a goal of reading 100 books in 2020. The combination of having this goal of doing a lot of reading and having a book with me means that whenever I have some downtime that I can’t necessarily do something significant, you know, other than reading, rather than pulling out my phone, I sit and read the other day.

I was at the carwash. It takes about 25 minutes. From the time I dropped my car off in the line until it’s ready for me. And they call me out to be. And rather than hopping onto my phone, which in and of itself creates a whole world of other decisions that I then must make. I pulled out my book and started to read, and I had the most wonderful, peaceful 25 minutes just sitting, reading, and relaxing and learning.

And there was nothing presented to me that I had to decide on. Right then I was just able to absorb the goodness of the writing that I was. When we create some simple parameters for ourselves and limit our online time, schedule it’s in. Then we don’t have to feel like we need to pick up our phones all the time.

We can leave them in our bags. We can leave them at home to go on a walk or to, you know, run an errand. We don’t have to be quite as tied to them as we are. And by scheduling the time so that we know, okay, in another hour, I’m going to check my email and I can get to the things that I need to do. That means that we release ourselves from the constant decision-making of having to respond to things all day long.

Tip 5: See Your To-Do List As An Idea Board

My fifth tip is a new cool concept that I’ve been thinking about. And it is the idea to only use your to-do list as an idea board. This means that rather than feeling the weight of everything on our to-do list, all the time, we consider those things just out there until we put one into our schedule in a specific place.

What happens a lot of times is that we use our to-do list as sort of our list of options of how to spend our time. We have all these things we want to do, and we must figure out which one to do, what order is best when to do it, how we’re going to get it done and all the thought process that goes along with everything on that list.

I’ve decided to start using my to-do list as my idea board, anytime something kind of pops into my head, I stick it on my to-do list, but that doesn’t mean that I have to do it or even think about it right now about once a week, when I do my planning for the week, I will look at my to-do list and I will put things, move them laterally from my to-do list into an actual place on my schedule, on my calendar.

Everything that doesn’t get moved from. On the to-do list to a place, a specific place in time on my calendar is ignored for the rest of the week. What this does is take the weight of all the endless things that we think we need to do, and it leaves it outside of ourselves. We only assume responsibility for the things that we have decided to do in a specific time.

This also could just be called planning really could just be called planning your life and scheduling things. We think we often think that we prefer to have all the to-do list options open and that when we have a little extra time, that we’ll figure out which one we want to do. And when, what ends up happening is that we just feel overwhelmed and like we’re not accomplishing anything at all.

When we move something from our to-do list or our idea list into a specific place on our calendar, we’ve removed all the decision-making around it. And now when that time comes, this is a good time to set your alarm. It tells you what you need to do next. My favorite example of this happened years and years ago, again, around 2013, 2014, when I was going through all my, sort of overwhelmed with having young kids, having a new house, running a business, trying to do all the things, and having not yet discovered the power of simplifying and living a more intentional life and minimalism. I was just running myself ragged and I decided to automate a bunch of my daily, weekly routine tasks into specific places on my calendar.

And my favorite example is that I decided I was going to clean the floors on Thursdays. I with three young kids and a huge backyard felt like my floors were always dirty. Not to mention the dog. My floors were always a little bit dirty, even right after I cleaned them. As soon as someone walked on them or the kids ran in from the yard, they would be dirty.

But I can’t clean the floor every single day, especially not in that house. We had a house that was quite a bit bigger than the one that I have now, but I would feel the frustration and stress and, and I’d think about it every day. Should I sweep now if I sweep now, what’s going to happen. Should I mop now?

Should I, after the kids go to bed and I always felt like I needed to do these things that I wasn’t getting to. And so, I finally just decided to move the, to-do of cleaning the floor onto Thursday and then to forget about it any other time. And on Tuesday, I would look at the floor and there might be like some extra crumbs from the toast at breakfast or a little smear of something.

And I would think, oh, I’m going to get to that on Thursday. And I would not think about it again until Thursday at nap time, when I would get everything ready, I’d get the vacuum and broom out. I’d get the mop in the soapy water going. And I would take, you know, it took about 45 minutes to clean the floors.

They would be sparkling and shining until the kids came home. I didn’t think about it at any other time. What this does when we plug our weekly and daily tasks into a specific time slot. And then we forget about them. The rest of the time is it reduces all the decision that we make around that same exact topic, that same item.

All the time. Do you find yourself asking yourself, when am I going to get to the laundry? When am I going to do the dishes? When am I going to clean the floors? When am I going to send those emails that I must send every week? When am I going to write that report? That’s due on the first of the month.

If you choose. You know, use your to-do list that long to do lists that puts so much pressure on you. And you simply think of that, not as a, to do list, but as a simple brainstorming of ideas. And then you only concern yourself with a task. Once you have moved it into a specific place on your schedule, you will notice that you feel so much lighter and you won’t be using your daily decision, making energy on all the things that might not happen.

You can simply focus on the things that you have chosen to do today. You’ve moved them into your schedule, and you can release the rest. I want to give you one more bonus tip. That just seems like such a good one to wrap up this episode about reducing your daily decisions. And that is to embrace the idea of a favorite.

Bonus Tip: Choose A Favorite

A lot of times we don’t want to choose a favorite, a favorite TV show, a favorite. Dessert a favorite restaurant, but if you embrace the idea of a favorite and you let that be your default or your go-to, when you don’t want to decide, or you do run out of your decision, making energy, you have somewhere to go.

You have your go-to favorite meal, your favorite snack, your favorite activity, your favorite way to exercise. If you don’t want to use the energy to choose. Then you already have something decided, and not just something, but something that you really like, something that you enjoy. Wouldn’t it be nice if all our default decisions, if we defaulted to the things that we liked and the things that we enjoyed, I think we would all enjoy our whole lives a lot better if we could do that.

Okay. Let me go over these five tips one more time and make sure that you use the worksheet to put some of these things into practice in your lives. And then I would love to hear how you’re doing with them. Okay.

So, the first tip is to eat the same thing every day.

The second tip is to eliminate your decisions surrounding your wardrobe.

Number three is to set reminders on your phone so that you don’t forget about the things that you want to be doing.

Number four is to schedule your online time. So, you don’t waste your time away being alerted about all the new things that you need to know about and think about all day long.

Number five is to use your to-do list as an idea board and not worry about something or stress about it until it has a place within you.

And your bonus tip is to embrace the idea of favorites. Allow yourself to have some defaults and make sure people know about them so that you don’t have to constantly be choosing something new.

Okay. I am sure that not every one of you is doing all these things. So, there was at least something that I shared today that you could implement in your life to feel a little bit lighter, a little bit more freedom, a little bit less bound to the idea of. So many decisions every single day, I hope that this has been helpful, and it will absolutely make a difference if you implement it and take action to use these tips in your life, not just hear them and think about them, but try them out and experiment with them in your own life.

You will see how much better you feel if you haven’t yet subscribed. Make sure you hit that button so that you don’t miss an episode. You can tune in every week. Same time, same place. 6:00 AM Eastern on Thursday. I also would love to invite you to share this episode with a friend to share it on social media on Instagram or another platform, and to leave a rating review.

If you haven’t done that yet, I’m excited to chat with you again next week. Have a good day.