one simple thing to make more room for creativity
Deciding is exhausting!
Is this you? I certainly feel this.
Decision fatigue: Here’s what dictionary.com says, “difficulty in making a good decision experienced as a result of the number of decisions one needs to take.”
Your brain has a finite amount of decision-making minutes each day. If you’ve heard any of the habit experts talk about this — they’ll tell you that you have a certain amount of willpower in your reserve, and once you use it up, it’s gone forever. Poof!
This means that if you successfully walked past the donut shop this morning, turned down chocolate cake after lunch, and went with salad instead of fries, you might very well cave come dinner time and eat the rest of the mac and cheese — straight out of the pot.
The more decisions you find you need to make in a day, the harder each decision will become.
You can’t even choose a box of cereal without feeling decision fatigue. Low carb, no-carb, natural, organic, gluten-free, grain-free, slivered almonds, or macadamia chunks — there are so many freaking choices! Even if you narrow it down to just the gluten-free options, there are still at least a dozen options to choose from in there.
If you don't plan what you're going to have for breakfast each morning and dinner each evening, you'll waste time staring into the abyss of your fridge and thinking about it. You might like a different latte flavor each morning when you make your coffee run. That time you spend hemming and hawing in line while under-caffeinated people behind you are getting more impatient by the minute is also depleting your brain.
If your morning looks like this — spending 15 minutes figuring out what to wear, thinking about what to have for breakfast, smoothie, oatmeal, or avocado toast. Well, you had a smoothie yesterday, and you should probably switch it up, and you might need that almond milk to bake brownies tonight. You run out of time and nuke some instant oatmeal. You’re packing your lunch and aren't sure what to eat, sandwich, salad, or leftovers. You think of what you'll want for dinner, and you don't want to eat the same thing for lunch and dinner.
It continues when you sit down to work.
You slide up to your desk to start working, and you don't know where to start. You look through your email, then pause to review a document. By the time 9 am hits, you’re exhausted and haven’t crossed a single thing off your to-do list. You get up to make a second coffee and add just a little more sugar because you need the jolt of energy. It’s not that you didn't sleep enough or you’re not well-rested. You're making way too many decisions in the morning.
The mundane parts of your life need automation. When you take the care to put habits in place that will serve you later, you save your precious brainpower and decision making power for bigger, more important decisions.
Creating a mindless morning routine will help.
You need a mindless morning routine to preserve your precious creative energy for the work that lights you up most. This means you won’t invent Pinterest-worthy lunches on a Wednesday — unless crafting Pinterest-worthy meals are your job. Automate that shit, so you can stop thinking about it Be boring as much as you can stand.
Eat the same thing for breakfast over and over, and eat similar meals for lunch and dinner every day. Follow the same order of getting things done in the morning. After some time, you won't even realize you're doing it.
You'll be going through the motions, but you can still do it in a mindful and slow kind of way.
For example, my morning looks like this — get up, deep breath, pee, walk dog, workout, shower, make coffee, make breakfast.
Before I begin working, I light a candle, review my schedule (which I wrote down the day before and lives in my Google calendar.) List some things I’m grateful for, add some notes or morning pages to my journal, then pop open my laptop and start working on the item I labeled as #1 for the day. Then, #2, and #3.
I used to do too much in the mornings and found myself exhausted.
When I found myself faced with too many decisions each morning, I’d drop the kids off at school and settle into working but would feel too scattered and exhausted to do anything. What’s a scatterbrain to do but hop onto Facebook and start scrolling? The next thing you know an hour has gone by, and I haven't done a single productive thing. I wasted all my brain juice on useless tasks that don't improve my life.
Decide what it is you want to create in your life, this year, this month, this week, and even today. Take a few steps back and figure out what habits you need to create to make that happen. When you pause to reflect on what will serve your life, you can approach all your tasks with more intention.
I spend a good portion of my day coaching business owners in the Unfussy Writing Community and writing for my clients. I love this work and really enjoy digging in and rolling my sleeves up. But at the same time, I was neglecting my personal goals — like writing more books and bringing together people to write.
This is why I created my morning routine. I don't have to think about it. I don't hit snooze. When the alarm buzzes, I launch out of bed.
Sure, sometimes the routine goes out the window. That’s fine and necessary.
My morning list isn't just another to-do list. It's doing the stuff that will make me feel like an accomplished human at the end of the day, week, and even my life. If nothing gets done besides the six items on my list each day, I’m winning.
When you frame your morning to-do list this way, it feels less like an obligation.
It becomes automatic — like breathing and eating dark chocolate after lunch.
When you automate parts of your life — the unimportant stuff like what you eat for breakfast, and the clothes you put on your body each day, when you sit down to do the work you really care about, you’ll be ready. Your brain will have the reserves to solve problems, be creative, or make something better.
This is how you set your life on a path to feeling accomplished at the end of the day. You did enough. You did the work that matters. You can go to bed with a smile on your face because you know that you spent your day intentionally and deliberately. Chosen by you. It is your life after all — you get to make the rules.
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