The Happiness Equation: Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything

4

Removal #1: How to make every decision at twice the speed

We duck out of the tiny six-seat plane and step carefully down the metal stairs. Deep blue skies hang like wallpaper over the world as we stare at empty yellow fields all around us. I am the official tour guide for Peter Aston, a European clothing chain CEO, on a trip over the ocean visiting big-box discount stores. We are three days into flights over Great Lakes, jagged rocks, and thick boreal forests.

Fifteen minutes later we get out of a cab, walk into a store, and start walking around. He asks questions and takes photos and I make notes and follow-ups for him. We are walking around the store when we get to the clothing section and Peter suddenly stops. He looks stunned. Eyes popping open, he reaches for his phone and starts snapping pictures. He is excited. “Look how busy the department is,” he says. “Customers are swarming over this section more than the last few like this. Notice how the last two stores are struggling to offer clear choices—mixed styles, colors smeared across the rainbow, inconsistent brands and labels. They were treasure hunts.”

I nod. Same chain but a different look. And much busier.

“This clothing department looks completely different. Somebody has taken the clothes shipped by the head office, ditched most of them, and created their own offering with a consistent style, theme, and colors. Shirts on one side, pants on the other, dresses at the back. All the same three colors. This is one of the best clothing departments I’ve seen. Beats a lot of stores they have overseas.”

Back on the plane to see a couple new stores in another town, I ask Peter what was so exciting about the display.

“Customers get the opinion of a trusted source. Someone you trust has made picks so you don’t have to. Nobody has time to wade through foggy seas of endless decisions. They give up. Or make bad choices. That display says here’s the color, here’s the style, here’s what you want. Take it or leave it. There are less decisions so you feel confident and trust the opinion.

“Early in my career I worked a summer job helping a buyer for fish in an American supermarket chain,” he continues. “We had every kind of fish. We had every kind of seasoning. It was all fresh. It was priced well. But nobody bought it. We couldn’t figure it out. Finally we realized customers were scared of buying fresh fish. Which one tastes best? How do you season it? How do you cook it? Too many decisions. So we changed our section. We only carried three kinds of fish at a time. Not ten, not fifteen, three. And we had one kind of seasoning for each. So you suddenly only had one choice to make. Cajun trout, teriyaki salmon, or lemon sole? Once you made your pick, the fishmonger dipped your fish in the seasoning and the label printed off the instructions on how to cook it.”

What happened?

“Sales were up over five hundred percent.”

I realized fewer choices means faster decisions. Our brains don’t need to mentally step into each new option and stretch out inside them, picturing them, evaluating them, holding them in our heads while we step into the next option.

Fewer choices means faster decisions.

How do the President of the United States and the CEO of Facebook make every decision at twice the speed?

Less time spent on decisions means more time for everything else.

What does President Obama tell us about making every decision at twice the speed? “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said in a 2012 Vanity Fair article. “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. You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.”

You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.

What about Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook?

“I own maybe twenty identical gray T-shirts. I mean, I wear the same thing every day, right?” he said in a Today interview.

Mark’s not turning heads on the runway, but he doesn’t care. His goal is building the world’s largest social media company. A minute more a day picking a T-shirt is a minute less a day he’s thinking about his company.

The curious case of Benjamin Lee

Cutting decisions, chopping decisions, cutting them out.

It takes me back to my first office job many years ago. I was twenty-two years old and had just graduated from university. Procter & Gamble hired me as assistant brand manager for Cover Girl and Max Factor makeup, and I started in the summer.

Benjamin Lee was the first person I met on my first day.

Chinese, in his midtwenties, Ben had thin, jumpy eyes, close-cropped hair, and wore tight dark clothes. I assumed he was a Zen Master because his desk had no pictures, no artwork, and no office work on it—just a tiny bowl of rocks punctured with three bamboo shoots.

Ben’s desk was right beside mine, and after a few weeks of working together I started noticing his style. Black shoes, black socks, black pants, brightly colored shirt. He looked good. Simple style. Everything fit.

“Can I ask you a question?” I asked him one night while working late. “Where do you get your clothes?”

He laughed. “You won’t believe it. Once a year I buy thirty white boxers, thirty identical pairs of black socks, fifteen custom-fitted dress shirts, and five pairs of black pants. I do laundry once a month. I never match socks, I never shop on weekends, I never spend any time thinking about what I’m wearing. It’s always the next thing in my closet. You’ll probably see this blue shirt again in a couple weeks.”

I thought back to a couple months prior, when I’d spent an entire Sunday shopping for what to wear on my first day at work. And a couple minutes every morning picking clothes. Laundry every weekend. And forget ever matching socks from the dryer.

“I calculated that never thinking about what to wear, doing laundry once a month, and going shopping once a year saves me fifteen minutes a day on average,” Ben continued. “Maybe more because I don’t lose any ‘frictional time’ jumping between thoughts. So I get eight to ten hours back every month. That’s an extra week of waking hours each year. Do you know how much I can get done in an extra week?”

I knew how much Ben could get done in an extra week.

He was on the fast track, delivering results, well liked by peers and bosses. Although he worked long hours like everyone else, he wasn’t working more hours than everyone else. He simply made better decisions, by making fewer decisions, by reserving his decision-making energy for things that mattered.

I had friends who spent time picking out cuff links, matching ties to socks, turning heads with trendy shirts. I know those friends wouldn’t trade in time shopping for the world. Wasted time? No, they loved that time.

But for me, I started thinking about other things instead of thinking about what to wear.

How much time was I spending making decisions every day?

And which ones weren’t important?

The most exhausting idea I’ve ever had

I decided to spend an entire day writing down every decision I made and then looking at which decisions I wanted to chop out of my life. Ben outsourced his clothing decisions! What could I outsource? This is the first step to understanding which decisions you can chop. An annoying process. But worth it. Here is every decision I made in one day:

Should I get up now or sleep a few more minutes?

Should I get up now or sleep a few more minutes?

Should I get up to go to the bathroom?

Should I have a glass of ice water or jump right in the shower?

Should I go to the gym?

Should I have a shower here or at the gym?

Do I have time to go to the gym before work if I leave now?

Should I eat breakfast after or make a shake for the car?

Should I put cinnamon in my shake?

Should I put yogurt in my shake?

Should I put spinach in my shake?

Should I put vitamin D in my shake?

Should I wear my work clothes to the gym and then change into my workout clothes there or wear my workout clothes to the gym and carry a hanger with all my work clothes on them?

What should I wear today?

Are these pants still clean?

Do these socks match this shirt?

Should I wear my brown belt or my black belt?

Which shirt should I wear?

Is this shirt too wrinkly?

Should I check email quickly now, in case there’s anything urgent?

Should I respond to this email now or when I get to work?

What should I say to this email?

What should I say to this email?

Do I need a hat today?

Do I need a scarf today?

Should I wear brown shoes or black shoes?

Should I put my clothes in my trunk or in my front seat?

Should I listen to the radio or have quiet in the car?

Which station should I listen to?

Which route should I take to work today?

Should I listen for the traffic report in case there’s an accident or just assume the highway is empty this time of the day?

Should I turn right on Queen Street or take Spadina to the Gardiner?

Should I try to pass this streetcar at the light or just stay behind it?

Should I turn left on Jameson to get to the highway or continue on Queen?

Should I turn left at Parkside to get to the highway or continue on Queen?

Should I gun it on this yellow light?

Should I turn left at Islington to get to the highway or continue on the Queensway?

Should I check email at this red light?

Should I check email at this red light?

Should I check email at this red light?

Should I turn left at Kipling to get to the highway or continue on the Queensway?

Should I check email at this red light?

Should I call Leslie to see if she woke up with her alarm clock?

Should I call anybody else?

Should I check my calendar for the day?

Should I park at the front door for convenience or far away to get extra exercise?

Should I change in this aisle or the aisle at the back of the locker room?

Should I take a full locker or a half-locker?

Do I need to lose weight around my stomach?

Do I need to shave today?

Do I look good?

Should I take a towel for my workout?

Should I do cardio or weights, or see if there’s a class going on?

Should I warm up on the StairMaster, treadmill, elliptical, exercise bike, rowing machine, or step machine?

How long should I set the time for?

Should I enter my age and weight or try to skip this?

Should I pick Manual, Hill, Random, Fat Burn, Cardio, Interval Training, or Fitness Test?

Should I keep going past five minutes or stop and do weights?

Did I sweat on the machine enough to get paper towels and spray to clean it?

Should I start weights with free weights or with a machine?

Should I look up a workout on my phone or just wing it?

What exercise should I do?

Should I do squats on the rack or with dumbbells?

Should I do three sets or try for four sets?

Should I get water or keep going?

What exercise should I do now?

Is this bench inclined enough or should I set it back a notch or two?

How much weight should I use?

Should I warm up first?

Should I do three sets or try for four?

Should I get water or keep going?

What exercise should I do now?

Should I say hi to Jackie?

Does Jackie want to talk or is she in intense-workout mode?

Should I check my email?

What exercise should I do now?

Should I focus on my chest or try to make this a full-body workout?

Should I look up other chest exercises on my phone?

Should I do dips, Pec Deck, chest flies, bench press, incline bench press, or decline bench press?

Are there other chest exercises on another website that I’m forgetting?

Should I lay my towel on the bench or leave it to the side?

How much weight should I try?

Should I increase the weight?

Should I get water now or later?

Should I check my email?

Should I try for twelve reps or twenty reps?

Should I increase the weight?

Should I check my email?

Should I call it a workout or try to do another chest exercise?

Should I do dips, Pec Deck, bench press, incline bench press, or decline bench press?

How much weight should I do on Pec Deck?

Do I need to change this seat height?

Do I need to change this starting position for the handles?

Should I get water now?

Should I check my email?

Should I check my email?

Should I read this email?

Should I respond to this email?

What should I say to this email?

Should I do another exercise or finish off with abs?

Should I do planks or situps?

Should I do front plank or side plank or both?

How long should I try to go for?

Should I try to do that again or switch to side planks?

How long should I try to go for?

Do I need to clean my sweaty head print off the mat?

How should I clean up my sweaty head print off the mat?

Should I weigh myself?

Should I get a drink of water?

Should I check my email?

Should I get another towel for a bathmat on this locker room floor?

Should I leave my clothes here or lock them up while I shower?

Should I sit in the steam room or whirlpool before I shower?

Which shower has the best water pressure again?

Which hook should I leave my towel on?

Should I shampoo my hair?

Should I dry off here or outside the showers?

Should I spray that foot spray on my feet or forget it?

Should I fold my gym clothes or just stuff them in my bag?

Should I check the class schedule on my way out?

Should I have a protein shake?

Should I leave my protein shake container in the car or go wash it inside at work?

Should I try to find parking in the front lot or head straight to the back lot?

Should I check email now?

Do I have any dry cleaning to take in?

Should I check email now?

Should I get water and go to the bathroom or set up my computer?

Should I go say hi to my boss?

Should I check email now?

What should I focus my time on today?

Should I check email now?

Should I check voicemail now?

Should I answer this instant message?

Do I need to prepare for my first meeting?

How should I respond to this email?

Should I try to find Joan in person, call her, or write back to her email?

Do I have anything to bring up at our team meeting?

Should I say this thought right now?

Do I agree or disagree with that point?

Should I say this thought right now?

Do I agree or disagree with that point?

Do I have time for a quick break before my next meeting?

Should I check email now?

Should I respond to this email?

How should I respond to this email?

How should I respond to this email?

Should I check voicemail now?

Do I feel like a snack?

What do I feel like eating?

Should I get a bowl of yogurt, order a breakfast sandwich, or get a chocolate milk?

Do I want to add granola, berries, or flaxseed to this yogurt?

Are the credit card points worth paying with credit for this?

Do I need napkins?

Should I go talk to Todd sitting by the window?

Which route should I take back up if I want to chat with Joan?

What should I say to her about the meeting?

Do I agree or disagree with Jamie’s plan?

What should I propose as a next step?

Should I check email now?

Should I stop at the bathroom or head to my desk?

Should I check email now?

Should I attend the total company meeting?

Should I see if anybody wants to sit together?

Should I sit at the front or the back?

Should I check my email?

Should I respond to this email now?

Do I need to do anything to prepare for my next meeting?

What’s my proposal going to be in this next meeting?

Should I check email now?

How should I spend the two hours I have open after this next meeting?

Should I walk around the building and visit my client groups?

Should I check email now?

Which way should I go?

Should I check email now?

What’s the best answer to that question?

Should I check email now?

Should I tell Mark about the feedback from his team?

How should I tell him?

Should I check email now?

Should I check email now?

Should I check email now?

Should I check email now?

Should I check email now?

Should I check email now?

Should I check email now?

How should I spend the next hour and a half?

Should I check email now?

Should I do this or that?

Should I check email now?

Should I check email now?

Should I check email now?

Should I respond to this email?

Should I check email now?

Should I check email now?

Should I check email now?

Should I get lunch from the cafeteria or go out for lunch?

Should I see if anyone wants to get lunch together or just go myself?

Should I check email now?

Do I want a turkey sandwich, roast beef sandwich, ham sandwich, egg salad sandwich, tuna salad sandwich, or cheese sandwich?

Do I want it on brown bread, white bread, multigrain bread, rye bread, olive bread, or in a pita?

Do I want it toasted?

Do I want mayo?

Do I want mustard?

Do I want tomatoes?

Do I want onions?

Do I want pickles?

Do I want lettuce?

Do I want cheese?

Do I want extra meat or is this enough?

Do I want salt and pepper?

Do I want it to go or for here?

Do I want anything else with this?

Do I want soup?

Do I want beef barley or split pea?

Do I want to get in the left line or the right line?

Should I check email now?

Do I want to pay with cash, credit, or debit?

Do I need any utensils?

Should I take plastic utensils or metal utensils?

How many napkins should I take?

Where should I eat?

Should I check email now?

Should I email Leslie now?

What should we have for dinner tonight?

Do we have chicken or fish in the freezer, or would takeout be easier?

Do I need anything to prepare for my next meeting?

Should I ask what the agenda is for this meeting?

Should I say something, since I disagree with that point?

Should I say something, since I disagree with that point?

Should I try to summarize the meeting and get everyone aligned on next steps?

Should I go back to my desk or talk to Ashley about the meeting?

Should I check email now?

Should I check voicemail now?

How should I spend the next three hours?

What time should I try to leave work today to meet Leslie for dinner?

Should I check email now?

How should I respond to this email?

Should I ask my boss for guidance on this email?

Should I go talk to Sean face-to-face instead?

What should we do tonight?

Should we try to visit my parents this weekend?

Should we try to visit Leslie’s parents this weekend?

Should we try to visit my sister this weekend?

What should I have for a snack?

Should I have almonds from my desk or buy something from the cafeteria?

Should I have cheese, carrot sticks, or a chocolate milk?

Should I pay with cash or credit card?

Do I need to take napkins up to my desk?

Which way should I walk back so I can talk to Mark?

Should I check email now?

Should I work on the change project or spend the rest of the day answering emails?

Should I work on the change project at my desk or book a room?

When should we make the promotion announcement?

How should we word the announcement?

Should I mention her education?

Do I need to send the announcement to anyone for approval?

Do I need to get anything done before going home?

Do I need to do any work tonight for any meetings tomorrow?

Do I need to take my laptop home tonight for anything else?

Do I need to talk to Amanda before I leave?

Is there any paperwork I need to finish with Tanya before I leave?

Which route should I take home?

Should I listen to the radio to check the traffic report?

Should I call my parents from the car?

Should I see if they’re free this weekend or next?

Should I stay on the highway or take the side streets?

Should I turn left at Bathurst or continue to Spadina?

Do I have time to stop at the post office to check my PO Box?

What do I need to get done tonight before bed?

What time should we try to go to sleep?

What kind of salad can I make?

Should I set the table with candles and place mats or should we eat casually on the counter?

What should we talk about over dinner?

How can I support her through that situation?

What ideas for the weekend should I propose?

Who should do the dishes and who should clean up the kitchen?

Should I check email now?

Should I see if Leslie wants to go for a walk or go to yoga after dinner?

Do I have time to write?

Should I write at home or at a coffee shop?

Should I check email now?

Should I stay up a bit later to read?

What time should I set my alarm for in the morning?

Do I plan to go to the gym?

What meetings do I have tomorrow that I need to think about?

285 reasons why you’re tired right now

What a day!

In total I made 285 decisions. Exhausting. What were they about? I’m embarrassed to admit I made 75 decisions at the gym, 62 decisions about checking email, and 32 decisions about food.

These three topics alone were half of all my daily decisions, yet they were things that didn’t really matter. Sure, it’s great to go to the gym. But there’s no reason I couldn’t studiously follow a written workout. Sure, part of my job is being responsive. But I would still be responsive if I checked email twice a day in fifteen-minute windows instead of as “brain padding” whenever I found a spare minute. And I love food. I never want to skip meals. I never want to eat at my desk. But a preset shake every morning with dinner leftovers every lunch would give me food I love and save thirty-two decisions.

What does all this decision-making do?

Why was I so tired when I got home at night?

Turns out the answers were right in front of me.

What do you find every morning and lose every night?

Imagine you start every morning with a bright yellow sponge firmly implanted in your brain. Sounds painful, but good news, it’s a magic sponge! This bright yellow sponge makes all your decisions for you. Just like that! Make a decision? A little chunk of sponge cracks off. This happens throughout the day. And what happens when the sponge is completely gone? You’re spongeless. You can’t make decisions. And there are only two ways to regrow your sponge: food and sleep.

Until you eat or sleep, you are mindless and ripe for making bad decisions.

John Tierney is the New York Times–bestselling coauthor of Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. He says: “Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue—you’re not consciously aware of being tired—but you’re low on mental energy.”

Many people are familiar with the painful process of walking around a giant department store and picking items for a wedding registry. When Leslie and I went to Hudson’s Bay at 10:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning, we were full of energy. Yellow bowls or blue bowls? Dark yellow or light yellow? Shiny or not that shiny? What about glasses? Should we get eight or twelve? Heavy or light? Do we need tall and short or just tall or just short? What design? What about wineglasses? Do we need twelve as well? What shape? What brand of blender? How many blankets? How many pillows? How many towels? What color towels? By the end we were exhausted. Our sponges had disintegrated. I remember the clerk asking if we wanted to add a $300 ice bucket at the end of our trip and us nodding with glassy eyes and our mouths hanging open.

“Once you’re mentally depleted, you become reluctant to make trade-offs,” John says, “which involve a particularly advanced and taxing form of decision making . . . To compromise is a complex human ability and therefore one of the first to decline when willpower is depleted . . . If you’re shopping, you’re liable to look at only one dimension, like price: just give me the cheapest . . . Decision fatigue leaves you vulnerable to marketers who know how to time their sales . . . And this isn’t the only reason that sweet snacks are featured prominently at the cash register, just when shoppers are depleted after all their decisions in the aisles. With their willpower reduced, they’re more likely to yield to any kind of temptation, but they’re especially vulnerable to candy and soda and anything else offering a quick hit of sugar.”

The only person whose rules you have no choice but to follow

I struggled investing money for years.

I read a book on how to do it myself and knew I had to try carving off a small percentage of income, move it to an investing account, and put it in a diversified fund. There was no reason not to invest! But at the end of the year, every year, any money I tried setting aside was just sitting there. Not invested. No increases, no dividends, no nothing. Just getting eaten away by inflation.

I felt stupid, lazy, and forgetful.

What was wrong with me?

I looked back and found a horrible case of decision fatigue had set in without me realizing it. When this happens people have only two options:

Make no decision.

Make a bad decision.

My bank didn’t have an automatic investing feature, so I had to do it myself. I set a calendar reminder on the first of every month to try to move some money into investments, but . . . whenever the first of the month hit, something happened. I looked at the price of the fund and if it had risen over the previous day, week, or month, I said to myself, “Oh, I don’t want to buy it now. It’s too expensive. I’ll wait a couple of days until it comes down.” Then I’d keep checking the price every day, multiple times a day. Occasionally it would come down and I’d buy some. But sometimes it would keep rising. So I’d watch it go up and keep telling myself I’d buy it as soon as it came back down. If it was $50 one day, $51 the next, and $52 the next, then even if it dropped down to $51, I’d tell myself it wasn’t as cheap as when I started, so I had to keep waiting. Eventually a month would pass and my calendar reminder would go off telling me it was time to invest again. But I hadn’t invested for last month yet! So I now had two months saved up, which meant my decision on when to invest was even more important.

My brain was feeling a tremendous amount of options around making these investment decisions. And I was just trying to buy one fund. I couldn’t overcome this fear. Soon another month had piled up. Then another. Anxiety set in about my failure to invest anything, and I called my friend Fred one night in a panic.

Fred studied economics under John Nash at Princeton, worked in investment banking for years, and, more important, was someone I trusted enough to share my financial failures with.

“I had the same problem,” he said. “Then I made rules for myself. I have three rules. I wrote them down on a piece of paper, which I leave at my desk. I follow the three rules even if I don’t want to.”

Rule #1: If Checking Account > $1,000, Move All $ over $1,000 into Investing Account.

Rule #2: If Investing Account > $1,000, Move All $ over $1,000 into Investments.

Rule #3: Never Break Rule #1 or Rule #2.

“It works because I remove my brain from the equation. I don’t have any choice, so I’m forced to be happy with how I’ve invested. If the fund went up in value, I tell myself I was smart for investing some earlier to capitalize on those gains! Like, if the market is at an all-time high and there has never been a worse time to buy, I tell myself, ‘Boy, I sure am smart only investing a little now and not my entire life savings.’ Alternatively, if the fund has gone down in value, I tell myself I was smart for saving money to benefit from lower prices today. It’s a win-win. Now all my money is invested, I don’t pay any adviser fees, and I don’t spend any time thinking about it.”

Rules. Limits. Barriers. Creating mental brick walls to stop making decisions. Like the fish department with all the choices removed. Why can’t we make rules for our own brain? Preserve our decision-making energy for decisions that matter. A guided workout at the gym. A preset breakfast shake.

What happens when we give ourselves less choice?

The unanticipated joy of being totally stuck

Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, wondered this, too. He gave a TED Talk about an experiment he ran on the Harvard campus:

We created a photography course, a black-and-white photography course, and we allowed students to come in and learn how to use a darkroom. So we gave them cameras, they went around campus, they took twelve pictures of their favorite professors and their dorm room and their dog. They bring us the camera, we make up a contact sheet, they figure out which are the two best pictures, and we now spend six hours teaching them about darkrooms. And they blow two of them up and they have two gorgeous eight-by-ten glossies of meaningful things to them and we say, “Which one would you like to give up?” They say, “I have to give one up?” And we say, “Oh, yes, we need one as evidence of the class project. So you have to give me one. You have to make a choice. You get to keep one, and I get to keep one.”

Now, there are two conditions in this experiment. In one case, the students are told, “But you know, if you want to change your mind, I’ll always have the other one here, and in the next four days, before I actually mail it to headquarters, I’ll be glad to swap it out with you . . . Better yet, I’ll check with you. You ever want to change your mind, it’s totally returnable.” The other half of the students are told the exact opposite. “Make your choice. And by the way, the mail is going out, gosh, in two minutes, to England. Your picture will be winging its way over the Atlantic. You will never see it again.” Now, half of the students . . . are asked to make predictions about how much they’re going to come to like the picture they keep and the picture they leave behind. Other students are just sent back to their little dorm rooms and they are measured . . . on their liking and satisfaction with the picture. And look at what we find.

First of all . . . [the students] think they’re going to maybe come to like the picture they chose a little more than the one they left behind, but these are not statistically significant differences. It’s a very small increase, and it doesn’t much matter whether they were in the reversible or irreversible condition.

Wrong-o. Bad simulators. Because here’s what’s really happening. Both right before the swap and five days later, people who are stuck with that picture, who have no choice, who can never change their mind, like it a lot. And people who are deliberating—“Should I return it? Have I gotten the right one? Maybe this isn’t the good one? Maybe I left the good one?”—have killed themselves. They don’t like their picture, and in fact even after the opportunity to swap has expired, they still don’t like their picture. Why? Because the (reversible) condition is not conducive to the synthesis of happiness.

So here’s the final piece of this experiment. We bring in a whole new group of naive Harvard students and we say, “You know, we’re doing a photography course, and we can do it one of two ways. We could do it so that when you take the two pictures, you’d have four days to change your mind, or we’re doing another course where you take the two pictures and you make up your mind right away and you can never change it. Which course would you like to be in?” Duh! Sixty-six percent of the students—two-thirds—prefer to be in the course where they have the opportunity to change their mind. Hello? Sixty-six percent of the students choose to be in the course in which they will ultimately be deeply dissatisfied with the picture.

No wonder we are exhausted from making decisions. Because we want to make those decisions. We want to go to the movie theater with the most movies playing, we like the restaurant with the long menu, we want the shoe store with the most shoes. But having more choice reduces our happiness. We get decision fatigue. What happens? We avoid the decision or we make a bad decision. And we always worry we made the wrong choice. This is why I always failed to invest any money. It’s why, looking back at our wedding registry, Leslie and I wondered who picked some of the things on there. We had to go through it all again with fresh sponges.

“Freedom and autonomy are critical to our well-being, and choice is critical to freedom and autonomy,” says Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice. “Nonetheless, though modern Americans have more choice than any group of people ever has before, and thus, presumably, more freedom and autonomy, we don’t seem to be benefiting from it psychologically.”

4 simple words that will help you prioritize everything

You make fewer decisions. You do some ten times faster, some five times faster, and some many times longer. But it all adds up to quicker decisions and focusing on what’s important. You look at decisions you make on a daily basis and decide which ones to automate, regulate, effectuate, and debate.

Ruby WatchCo. is one of the most popular restaurants in Toronto—ranked in the top ten of thousands in the city—and run by celebrity chef Lynn Crawford. Before opening the restaurant, Lynn worked as executive chef at the Manhattan Four Seasons, starred in Restaurant Makeover, and wrote two bestselling cookbooks.

Her restaurant operates like no other in the city!

Reservations are taken at only two seating times, it’s a flat fifty bucks per person, and the four-course prix fixe menu changes every day. What else is available besides the four-course prix fixe menu? Nothing! There are no other choices. Nothing else to eat, no menus to choose from, no prices to think about. And everybody gets dessert. For the kitchen, there are only allergies to accommodate—cooking is streamlined, dishes all the same size, waste is limited, and checks added quickly for faster turnaround.

Everything arrives “family-style” in big dishes at the center of the table, and the dimly lit chattery dining room is packed every night of the week. The Globe and Mail says, “It’s nice for the chef, who gets to be spontaneous. Also very nice for the chef to give up that whole challenge of offering different menu items, as the cost and stress of both stocking and cooking different foods is eliminated. It’s so much easier!”

Lynn says, “The decision of what to choose at a restaurant can be overwhelming. I’m thrilled when someone says, ‘Let me cook for you.’”

Delaying is gone. Choosing nothing is gone! And businesses like Lynn’s restaurant can benefit.

Guess what Stanford researcher Sheena Iyengar reports Procter & Gamble found when they chopped the varieties of Head & Shoulders on the shelf from twenty-six to fifteen? When you remove half the number of bottles the customers sees, your sales must go down, right? Nope, they got a sales increase of 10%.

When we are presented with too many decisions, we either:

Do nothing. Our brains are exhausted, so we stop making decisions completely. We walk out in protest! This is what happens on forms where you need to pick one of twenty-five different investment funds for your pension or twenty-six varieties of shampoo. What do people do? Ignore them all. Go with the default. We are so tired by this point we quit completely.

Do poorly. Don’t feel like quitting? Well, there is another option. Making a decision that stinks. Being so exhausted you pick something, anything, just to get the decision-making done. Adding a $300 ice bucket to your wedding registry. Grabbing a king-size Oh Henry! at the end of your grocery shop. Easiest over best.

Your brain is the world’s most valuable piece of real estate. It produces world-changing ideas, creates beautiful art, and explores great mysteries of life. But trivial decisions and endless choices buzz in front of your brain all day. They’re flashing lights. Preventing you from pushing deeper. How can—ding!—think about—ping!—when all you’re—ring! Endless decisions steal your deep thoughts.

Tiny decisions squat on your primo lot rent-free. They don’t pay. They don’t apologize. They just steal your brainpower. Sure, a lot of this comes from our increasingly connected world. Nicholas Carr, author of New York Times bestseller The Shallows, says, “The Net’s interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.”

I made 285 decisions on an average day. My brain was contemplating, weighing, evaluating, and deciding every minute I was awake.

But there is a secret. A secret to removing choice and making every decision at twice the speed.

After studying personal leadership traits among successful Ivy League grads, Fortune 500 CEOs, and bestselling authors, I slowly discovered the most successful people use the same secret to rid their brains of all the extra weight of hundreds of decisions a day.

It’s simple.

The Just Do It Scribble.

There it is. That simple. Every decision you make sits somewhere in this box.

It takes a little time . . . or a lot! It’s not very important . . . or it’s a big deal!

Here, let me fill it in for you.

Automate—Buying toilet paper and detergent. Paying the phone bill. Deciding your route to work. Picking your workout routine. If it’s low in time and low in importance, your goal is to automate. Outsource your brain completely and don’t think about it again. Set online refills to ship toilet paper and detergent monthly. Set up auto bill payments from your bank account. Download a traffic-maps app and mindlessly follow the best route to work. And set a workout schedule and follow it. Free your brain. Just don’t mistake these smaller decisions for the more important decisions in which they reside. Deciding to work out every day is important. Picking which dumbbell to lift next is not.

Effectuate—Grabbing the kids from day care. Eating dinner with the family every night. Saying hi to your team every morning. Effectuate is a big word with a simple meaning: Git ’er done. Nail it. Just do it. If it’s low in time but high in importance, your goal is to just do it. There is no decision to make. Simply effectuate.

Regulate—Checking email. Managing your calendar. Doing chores. If it’s high in time and low in importance, your goal is to regulate. Make rules and follow them. Set an email window. A single calendar review meeting. A chores blitz every Sunday morning instead of painfully doing one or two a day.

Debate—Buying a house. Picking a spouse. Applying for a job. Moving. High-importance, high-time decisions are the ones to spend the most time on. Debate in your head, call trusted friends, list the pros and cons. Slow the decision down to molasses so you can engage in a proper debate. These are the ones that matter.

—

Automate, Regulate, and Effectuate all remove decisions from your head.

What are you left with?

Debate.

Deep thinking, questioning, wondering.

Weighing big decisions that matter in order to avoid making bad ones.

Every now and then, thinking about the decisions in your life and writing them down in this box will help sort out for yourself what matters and what doesn’t. What can you Automate so you never think about it again? What can you Regulate so you do it in set times and windows? What can you Effectuate as something you simply just do? And what can you Debate—what big thoughts can you chew on to make sure you’re doing the right thing?

Over time you will do this automatically, without thinking about it. You will have developed the muscle to automatically chunk out your decisions.

Now, the secret isn’t perfect. Sometimes small decisions will leak out and become big deals in your head. But that’s okay. The goal is not to be perfect. The goal is just to be better than before. Automating, regulating, and effectuating free your mind and free your time.

Your aching brain will thank you.