Decision fatigue is the progressive deterioration in the quality of decisions as more decisions are made throughout the day. Self-regulation capacity is a limited resource: each choice spends a little of it. By the end of the day, the brain seeks the path of least resistance: impulsivity, passivity, or procrastination.
Concept origin
Roy Baumeister developed ego depletion theory in the 1990s, documenting that willpower depletes like a muscle. Danziger et al. (2011) found that judges granted parole significantly more often in the morning than at the end of the day. The "ego depletion" research has methodological debates but the practical phenomenon is robust.
Therapeutic approach
To mitigate decision fatigue: make important decisions in the morning, reduce trivial decisions with fixed routines (clothes, meals), group similar decisions into blocks (batching), and take breaks with low-cognitive-cost activities between intense work blocks.
Related concepts
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