As a leader, you’ll be making a lot of decisions for your team every day. Depending on various factors—like the size of your company—these decisions can quickly become overwhelming. They’ll result in decision fatigue, draining your mental energy and causing many issues for you and your staff.

In this guide, we’ll explore the concept of decision fatigue in depth. We’ll cover what causes it, what are its impacts, and how to identify it. We’ll also look at how you can avoid choice fatigue with a simple productivity tool you might be using already: a time tracker.

What is decision fatigue?

To start off, let’s explore the definition of the concept—what is decision fatigue? It is the exhaustion you might feel when making decisions, for example after dealing with lots of them in a day. A lot of choices can be taxing on you, eventually draining your mental energy. As you might imagine, being in this state can have many negative effects. You’ll be too tired to perform your best, and might not even be able to focus on your work at all.

We’ll explore the consequences of decision fatigue in depth in just a bit. Before that, let’s go over the main causes of the concept.

What causes decision fatigue?

Decision fatigue is commonly a result of the decision-making process itself. This can be divided into many categories, but the ones we’ll look at are:

• Too many choices
• Important decisions
• Overthinking choices

Too many decisions

Making too many decisions in a day can be pretty exhausting. As a leader, you’re probably quite familiar with this. But, too many choices can also affect your management team. This type of decision fatigue will build up slowly over a day, with the quality of your choices going down the more of them you make.

Important decisions

Making too many decisions can lead to fatigue—but, their importance matters a lot as well. According to HBR’s “A Simple Way to Make Better Decisions”, people make up to 35 thousand choices every day. Most of these aren’t major enough to cause fatigue on their own. But, some of them can be—especially for company executives.

If you’re making an important decision, like one that will have lasting effects on your business, you’ll need to think about it quite a bit. Constantly allocating your energy to such decisions can make it harder to make other ones. As you spend time thinking about one choice, you may even start getting frustrated and be tempted to make a decision just to be done with it.

Overthinking decisions

While some decisions require a lot of thinking to make the optimal choice, many others do not. But, you might sometimes end up spending lots of time on such decisions anyway. You’ll effectively drain your mental energy for an unimportant task. As already mentioned, thinking about one decision for too long can even affect the quality of that choice—making your efforts even less effective.

General mental fatigue

Besides making decisions, choice fatigue can also be caused by general tiredness. You might have noticed that making any decision—even a small one—is more challenging later in the day. A key reason for this is that decisions need mental energy, regardless of how important or insignificant they are.

The impacts of decision fatigue

Decision-making fatigue can be detrimental in a variety of cases. The two main ways it can affect you and your team are:

• Procrastination
• Suboptimal decisions

Procrastination and reduced productivity

After setting in, decision fatigue can make it difficult to get any work done. You will be too tired to focus and will get distracted by the smallest things easily. While this is less than ideal for one person, it can be quite bad for a team of people—like your managers and senior leadership.

Poor decision-making

If you experience decision fatigue while you still have to make more choices, you’re likely to make poor and uninformed ones. As mentioned before, the quality of your decisions will go down as you get more tired. As a result, it’s important to make important decisions earlier on in the day—which is something we’ll explore in detail a bit further down.

Identify decision fatigue for you and your team with a time tracker

To avoid the negative effects of decision fatigue—especially poor choice-making—it is important to identify it in time. This is especially important for your management and leadership team. An excellent way of doing so involves a productivity tool that your company likely already uses: time tracking apps.

Detect distractions

Detecting distractions is one of the easiest ways of spotting fatigue. If your staff cannot focus on their work, they’ll be easily distracted. This can be a sign for you to ensure they’re not working on any important decisions at that moment.

Track tasks

Tracking what types of tasks your team members work on is another excellent option. If your managers are always making important decisions for your company, they’re likely suffering from choice fatigue on a regular basis.

Avoiding decision fatigue with a time tracker

Besides identifying it, a time tracker can also help you avoid decision fatigue in the first place. There are four main ways it does this:

• Correct prioritization
• Enhanced collaboration
• Easier delegation
• Accessible data-driven decisions

Prioritize decision-making tasks

A great way to avoid decision fatigue is to make your choices early on in the day. This will help you make better decisions without any sacrifices. That said, you will likely still end up tired at the end of the day. But, you can move less important tasks to these hours to take advantage of your peak productivity time to the fullest.

Time tracking apps are perfect for this—if they offer high-quality task management systems. Using an app like WebWork, you can plan your days ahead of time to spend your time as efficiently as possible. You can even use a variety of time management techniques with such apps—like time blocking or timeboxing.

Collaborate on certain decisions

Collaborating on various decisions is an excellent way of taking some of the load off yourself or your managers. Working with others can often produce better results. A second perspective on any issue will enable your business to come up with better solutions to its problems.

Enhancing collaboration with time trackers is pretty simple. Feature-rich apps will allow you to manage decisions you want assistance on like tasks. You can assign collaborators and even add sub-tasks in a tracker like WebWork, further simplifying your work.

Delegate less important decisions

If you notice that you need to make decisions constantly, it might be time to start delegating. This can be difficult—especially if you’re doing it for the first time. But, finding the right people to delegate less important decisions to is vital to managing your time correctly.

Just like the last two points we discussed, task management systems will be invaluable for delegation. But, other functionality like powerful member and permission management will be helpful as well.

Make data-driven decisions

The best decisions in any situation are informed ones. An excellent way of ensuring this for your business is using concrete data. Data-driven decision making can help your business account for more variables before deciding on anything. Consequently, you’ll make more accurate choices that will have a lasting, positive impact on your team.

High-quality time trackers with plenty of tracking features are perfect for data-driven decisions. For example, by tracking things like employee productivity and task progress, you can make informed raise calculations.

Time tracking features that will help reduce decision fatigue

Before closing off this article, let’s briefly explore some time tracking functionality that can help you avoid choice-making fatigue as a business owner.

Management features

Several workforce management features can be useful in not just making decisions faster but also delegating them to others. Key examples of these include:

• Leave management
• Automated payroll
• Project budgeting
• Expense tracking
• Work-life balance monitoring

Tracking functionality

As mentioned already, data-driven decision-making can have a measurable impact on your firm. To take advantage of it to the fullest, you’ll of course need lots of data. As a result, a time tracker with plenty of tracking features will help you make better choices with more information. Key tracking functionality you should look for in time trackers includes:

• Activity level
• App and website usage
• Project and task progress

Final thoughts

Decision fatigue can be a silent drain on productivity—both for you and your team. Time tracking apps can help you spot and avoid it before it can impact your work. By delegating, prioritizing, and relying on data, you can keep your mental energy in check—while making better choices at the same time. A time tracker can help enhance your focus—boosting your productivity and the effectiveness of your work.