Decision Architecture
Decision Fatigue Check: How Much Are Your Decisions Costing You?
Six questions about how your choices hold up across the day, with one change to make first.
About this self-check
Decisions tend to feel harder, and turn out worse, late in a demanding day. The experience is common. The best-known explanation, that willpower is a fuel tank that empties, has not held up well: a 2016 replication across more than twenty labs failed to find the basic effect. What does hold up is that making many choices has a cost, so the useful fix is making fewer of them.
How it works
Six questions across five areas: how many decisions you face, putting decisions off, regretted choices, judgment under pressure and how quickly you reset. Each area is scored out of 100 and the overall score is their average, with 33 and 66 as our cut-offs for low, moderate and high. It is a self-check, not a validated scale.
What you'll get
You see your overall level, which area is leaking most, and a short plan that starts by removing decisions rather than trying harder at each one.
Common questions
What is decision fatigue?
The experience of decisions getting harder, and often worse, after you have made a lot of them. The experience is common and well recognised. The best-known explanation, ego depletion, has struggled to replicate, so the mechanism is still debated.
How many decisions does the average person make per day?
You will often see a figure of 35,000. We could not find a study behind it, so we do not use it. The more useful question is how many of your decisions could be turned into defaults.
Can you prevent decision fatigue?
You can reduce it. Turn low-stakes decisions into routines, move important decisions to the time of day you think best, and take real breaks between decision-heavy blocks.
Is decision fatigue the same as burnout?
No. Burnout is longer-term exhaustion tied to work, usually with cynicism and a falling sense of effectiveness. Decision fatigue can be part of it, but it also happens to people who are otherwise well and simply face too many choices.