Decisions, Decisions 🤔

Plain Tee’s and Adidas Slides

Greetings!

Welcome back to Classic Consistency, the newsletter designed to help you live a more balanced life while also developing yourself as a stronger and more influential leader!

Have you ever gotten to the end of your day and felt like all of your mental energy was gone? Does trying to think of what to have for dinner or answering simple questions from your family make you feel overwhelmed or frustrated? If so, you may be dealing with decision fatigue. If you’ve never heard of it, decision fatigue is the phenomenon of feeling more and more mentally and emotionally depleted as you go through your day, based on the number of decisions you make.

From the second we wake up until the moment we fall asleep, we are constantly making decisions. On average, people make about 35,000 decisions a day. We all wake up with a finite amount of mental energy, and every decision we make, big or small, uses some of that energy. The more complex the decision, the more energy it takes.

In today’s newsletter, I want to share a few tips that you can implement into your daily or weekly routine to help limit the amount of energy you spend on everyday decisions. Often, it’s not the big decisions but the small ones that add up throughout the day and cause us to crash. Planning for some of these decisions can help lighten the load and leave you with a little more mental horsepower to use on the decisions that matter most!

Tip #1. Simplify Your Wardrobe

“You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits. I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” - Barack Obama

Investing time to dig through your wardrobe and get rid of the things you don’t wear will leave you with a smaller selection of things you will wear. Having to stare at a bunch of clothes you haven’t worn in months can be both frustrating and time-consuming. Keeping your selection simple and practical helps alleviate the stress and time involved in picking out your clothes. Aside from my work uniforms, I have a stack of plain-colored t-shirts, a few pairs of shorts, and my Adidas slides. So unless it’s a special occasion, I never have to spend more than 10 seconds picking out what I’m going to wear for the day.

Tip #2. Meal Prep

Taking time at the beginning of your week to plan and prep your meals will save you a ton of time (and money) throughout your week.

Showing up to work without a lunch requires you to decide where you want to go, how much you want to spend, what you’re going to order, whether you’re going to dine in or take it back to the office, etc. Now add to that not having dinner plans when you get home. This generally leads to realizing you probably need to stop at the grocery store to buy ingredients, which then leads to just deciding to get takeout (again) or Uber Eats, which causes you to spend more money and eat less healthily.

Tip #3. Schedule Your Big Decisions

“An hour of planning can save you 10 hours of doing.” - Dale Carnegie

Things like difficult financial decisions, shopping for a large number of items, planning a detailed itinerary, or managing a busy schedule are all examples of big hitters when it comes to decision fatigue. Trying to make decisions on these matters in the middle of a busy day can cause huge amounts of unnecessary stress. Setting aside time for a few quick meetings with yourself, your family, or your partner throughout the week to make decisions on things like the budget, grocery list, and upcoming appointments can help ensure you’re mentally equipped to make the best choices possible. Try to keep these meetings under 15 minutes and at a time that works for everyone.

Here are some examples of things you might want to consider making weekly or monthly meetings for:

• Financial/budgeting decisions

• Vacation planning

• Creating the weekly grocery list

• Planning your meals for the week

• Going over your work hours and appointments

Making decisions all day can be exhausting. Instead of finding yourself at the end of a 30-minute movie-picking session on Netflix because you’re just too mentally drained to choose something, try implementing these tips to put some of your recurring decisions on autopilot. This will help save you some mental energy that you can better spend in your free time or with your family at the end of the day!

Thank you for reading! If you have any feedback or want to discuss this topic further, please do not hesitate to reach out.

Until next time,

Keep it classic, stay consistent.

Gino

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Bulletin Board 

Books I Just Finished 📚 

Ego Is The Enemy, By Ryan Holiday - This one had been on my “want to read” list for almost two years! I finally pulled the trigger on the audiobook and finished it on my commute to work. Super good perspectives and leadership nuggets throughout the whole book. Highly recommend! 

Everyone Communicates, Few Connect, By John Maxwell - This was the first physical book I’ve read in a long time. I listened to the audiobook last year but this time I took the time to highlight lines and paragraphs that resonated with me. A must-read for anyone looking to up their communication skills on a one-to-one or public speaking level!

CommitFit 🏋️‍♀️

My wife just kicked off her very own virtual fitness program called CommitFit last week! Please click on the link below to check out her website and promotional video.

https://linktr.ee/CoachCassCommitFit

Quote of the Week ✍️

Knowledge is like paint… it does no good until it’s applied - Doe Zantamata