Episode 480: Overcoming decision fatigue in small business
Feeling overwhelmed by constant decisions? Fiona Killackey dives into the reality of decision fatigue and how it can impact your productivity. As she puts it, "Decision fatigue is absolutely real, even at this time of year when everyone's excited and got momentum."
In this episode, Fiona shares simple tips to help you manage mental energy, make clearer decisions, and streamline your day. She also introduces her "40-minute test" and offers practical advice for taking back control and keeping your business on track.
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Hello and welcome to episode 480 of the MyDaily Business Podcast. Today, it's a coaching episode, and I think this is a really important one, particularly if you are—and I'm smiling because I can do this myself too—somebody who puts off things that generally might not actually take you that long. But you will spend weeks, or even months, putting them off. If that is you, or if you've ever suffered from having to make a decision and just, well, stick with it and be okay with it, then today's episode is for you.
Before we get stuck in, I want to let you know that group coaching is open. If you would like to apply, please head over to mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching, and you'll be able to fill in the application. We are starting interviews pretty soon, so if you'd like to be in there chatting with yours truly about your business and potentially working together for the next year in a group coaching programme with myself and a beautiful group of wonderful, open, and excited people, who are there to cheer you on when things are going well, and to build you back up when things are not going so well—then come on over and apply.
You can find all the information about this 12-month programme at mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching.
And before we actually get into today's coaching episode, I want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of these beautiful lands. These are the lands that I get to run the group coaching programme on, work, live, and play on, and just be with my family, my loved ones, and my clients. For me, that is the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin nation. I pay my respects to their elders, past and present, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded.
Alright, let’s get into today’s coaching episode.
I have two young children. One is literally 12, and the other is five—well, he just had his birthday very recently. Now, with my five-year-old, I’ve, to my detriment, got him used to going to a department store every so often and choosing something that he would like to buy. He has his pocket money, he does his chores around the house, and he often decides to buy things like monster trucks or toys.
Now, on occasion, it has taken him a long time to make a decision. And I find myself getting frustrated and impatient—I'm just being very honest here, not the perfect mum all the time. And I’ll say to him, "You need to make a decision." If you're not going to make a decision, then I'm happy to go without anything—let’s just walk away.
This also happens with this idea of "I’ve got so many choices, where do I even start?" and not wanting to make a decision because maybe you're going to make the wrong one. In his case, he might say, "I want this monster truck," but then regret his decision in five minutes.
It can be a hard thing for a kid to work through, but it’s also really tough for small business owners to deal with this sort of decision overwhelm. You can get absolutely exhausted by the number of decisions you have to make as a small business owner—constantly, all the time.
In addition to this, when you have staff or other people coming in and out of your business, asking for decisions on XYZ, or for you to approve something or push it through, it can feel overwhelming. It’s like, "Ah!" It just feels so heavy.
And so today, I wanted to talk about decision fatigue—what it is, and then how you get yourself through it. Because, at the start of the year, as I’m recording this, you have that momentum. That spark, that fresh energy. You have just you—whether you absolutely hate vision boards and words of the year, or whether you totally embrace them (I’m definitely in the latter camp). But there’s something about that momentum that most people have at the start of the year. It feels like a clean slate, a fresh start.
We're going to do XYZ differently, or maybe I'm really going to do this this year. And it could be something to do with your health, it could be relationships, it could be work. Obviously, this is a business podcast, so I'm going to talk about it in relation to business. But we have this kind of momentum, and it's in this point that you can also, weirdly, simultaneously be excited but also overwhelmed with how many decisions there are to make.
And so I want to break it down. Firstly, if you've never heard of the concept of decision fatigue, it kind of gets its origins in Freud. And most people understand who Freud is—he said some weird stuff about families and everything else—but he had this idea that our brain almost has an energy bank, an amount of energy that we pull from every single day.
I'm actually often saying this to my eldest son. I'm like, you have 24 hours of energy. Do you really want to spend the energy bank on XYZ? You know, you all see those memes saying, “Beyoncé, we all have the same 24 hours as Beyoncé,” which is... I do not agree with that. Beyoncé has a lot of help and a lot of other things going on. But anyway, I digress, back to this.
So it came from partly that—this idea that we all have this energy, and we can't deplete it. You know, you want to maintain some of it. But there was this researcher called Roy Baumeister. I'm not sure exactly how you say it, but he came along and sort of coined this term "decision fatigue" because he was looking at why people get mentally and emotionally drained from making choices all day.
And, you know, we've all done it. You get to like 4:00 or 5:00 and you're like, "I am spent." Or even things like, we've just gone through Christmas. We celebrate Christmas in my family, and I have a lot of friends who celebrate Christmas. I was talking to one of my good friends, Nona Forever, and we were talking about the amount of decisions that parents, and particularly sometimes women, have to make around the kids.
And just everything around—all the different things: the food, the different days that you celebrate, who's coming where, who's getting what presents for whom. And there's so many decisions. You can feel absolutely spent going through that. And the same thing goes, you know, for all sorts of different ideas that you have or different events that come up in your life that you're like, “Ah, there’s so many decisions to make!”
And obviously, in a business, this plays out in business. I see this all the time because you've got these brilliant business owners who can direct and delegate and do all this stuff. In the morning, they’re like, "Yep, okay, fresh day, got up at 5am, blah blah blah," and they feel great. But then it gets to the afternoon or the evening, and it’s like, "I don’t want to make another single decision. I’ve got nothing left in the tank."
And then, for lots of people, you have to then turn around and go home and start your second job—as a parent, or a guardian, or a partner, or you’re looking after your pets or whatever it is. So, it’s not that people are bad at decision-making, it’s that their mental energy bank—that thing that Freud talked about—is just really running low.
So, that’s the concept of decision fatigue. It’s really thinking about where you're literally tired of making decisions. And at this time of year, like I said, you can be so excited and have this momentum, but you can also have the parallel of, "Ah, there’s so many decisions to make."
So today, I wanted to talk about: Okay, if you’re facing this, what do you do? What do you do, really?
According to psychology, there are kind of four elements of decision fatigue. And I think it’s important to talk about these four because you may resonate with one of them, but also, it impacts how you then work through this decision fatigue.
So the first is procrastination, the second is impulsivity, the third is avoidance, and the fourth is indecision. So procrastination—it’s not just, you know, you see this thing like, “Oh God, she’s such a procrastinator,” or, “Oh, you’re just procrastinating.” And we use it as such a buzzword, but it’s not just about putting things off.
It’s specifically saying, "I’ll figure that out later," which is kind of like avoidance. But it’s, "I’m going to figure that out later when you’re faced with decisions." So, for example, if you, I don’t know, let’s say you’ve got a new collection coming out and you know that it needs to appeal to maybe a less affluent customer, you may have some decision fatigue around the pricing structure. Or let’s say you know that you need to update something in your SOPs, or maybe even update a course or update—I don’t know—maybe the fit-out of your shop.
And it’s like, there’s so many decisions to make. So, you know what? Let’s just park it. Let’s just park it until... And you’ll give yourself some imaginary date in the future, and then you can even come to that date and then you park it again. And you kind of just keep pushing it off as opposed to dealing with it.
And so with this, I think it was the American Medical Association that had research on this. They said that when this happens, it’s basically it. Because your brain is saying, “I don’t have the energy to process this right now.”
And we’ve all done that, even with conversations. I was having a conversation with my husband the other night, actually—he was having a conversation with me. And I was exhausted. It was the end of the day. You know what? I just wanted to get to bed. I was reading this book. I’ve just finished it. It’s called Green Dot. Two separate people gifted it to me last Christmas.
It's okay, it's okay. It was fine. I got through it, but I just wanted to read it. I was up to the end of the book, and he wanted to talk about something more serious to do with... I kind of remember what it was at the time.
And I said to him, "I can't, I can't, babe. Like, can we just talk about this tomorrow?" Because I knew that all my brain could deal with was this sort of romance novel that I was reading. I can do the same with reality TV. You can just switch out because you don't have to make decisions when you're watching it. It's just like this thing playing in front of you. And so that is procrastination. It's this: "I'll do it later."
The second one that's talked about is impulsivity. This is the "You know what? Let's just do it. Just whatever, whatever you want to choose, just choose that. Cool, let's do it." So it's done. And I have to say that I have definitely done this. Definitely. And I've done this, and sometimes it's been great.
Sometimes I'm like, "You know what, let's just go on holiday. I'm just gonna book it right now." And then suddenly I've booked it, and I'm like, "I didn't really think about that" or "I didn't really think it through." But it's really about making hasty decisions without proper consideration. You just want to get them off your plate. And it's directly linked to decision fatigue because you're so fatigued with having to make decisions that you're like, "Cool, cool."
You see it. I actually saw it the other day really play out well in a WhatsApp chat that I'm in. I wasn't participating, but it was about an event that was being organized, and I wasn't able to attend that event. So I was just sort of an observer in the background of all the chat.
The amount of switching—"Should we do this? Maybe we should do that. Maybe I should book this. Oh, no, you can book that. Oh, maybe we should go here. Oh, does anyone want to sit outside or does anyone want to sit inside?"—it was like... And then somebody finally said, "Oh, my goodness, we're all being very polite. Can we just make a decision?"
In that case, it wasn't necessarily impulse because it had been going on for a couple of days, or even a week. But you definitely can be in that mindset. And sometimes you're doing it without considering because you're just like, "I just want this off my plate." So whatever, cool, you do.
I see that play out a lot in big marketing teams, where people are kind of over-talking about a campaign or over-dissecting it, and they're like, "Cool. Yep, cool. Can we just get on with it?" It can be quite negative sometimes. But really, this can be detrimental because it's like saying yes to a client project. Or I've definitely said this in the past: "Yeah, sure, no, definitely, we can do that," when I haven't got the capacity to do it. Or it's a pro bono job, and I haven’t realized that I’ve already taken on two other pro bono jobs.
So it's really like making these snap decisions that aren't always considered. That's impulsivity. Often, this can happen late in the day or late in a project when you're just like, "I'm so over this right now. Let's just... whatever, whatever, we'll just buy that one, and we'll be fine."
And I think the worst case when this happens is when you're interviewing people for a job. And you're like, "You know what, we just need to fill this, so who cares? We'll just hire that person. Yes, they're not quite right, but whatever." And that can be very, very detrimental.
When I had Phoebe Bell from Sage and Clair on the podcast recently—she's come on twice—she came on to episode 400. She was talking about one of the biggest things that she's learned: to take your time with finding the right staff, even if that means you've got an empty role for a while.
Yes, it puts a bit of stress and strain on everyone else, but it's better to hire the right people than to just put somebody in the role because you need it filled, and then, you know, inevitably have to deal with the potential consequences of that.
The third is avoidance. And I see people do this all the time. One of my clients, who I absolutely love, I remember having a conversation with them, and they said, "Yeah, I used to look at my numbers, and I was like..." And then I asked, "When did you stop looking at the numbers?"
And they said, "When I didn't like the numbers." We both just laughed, but they were just so honest. They were like, "I didn't like the numbers, so then I just avoided looking at them." I love how honest you are.
But it's different from procrastination because it's actively avoiding a situation where decisions need to be made. And maybe that is things like not having that confronting conversation with somebody because you know that it will be a decision you need to decide if they're going to still work with you or not.
It could be, I know I've done this in the past, just not opening an email because you're like, "Ah, you know, that's going to be a yes or no question, and I don't know if I'm in the headspace to do it." It could be skipping meetings when you know certain choices are going to be made at that meeting, and you're like, "Let them figure it out." It could be all sorts of things.
And I have to say, I'm probably not an avoider as much as some of the other things, but I definitely have worked with lots of people who are. And it can be a pattern that people avoid. It's kind of that whole "short-term gain, long-term pain" because you avoid things. And then, ultimately, you have to deal with the long-term pain, like maybe a decision being made that you weren't comfortable with, or letting things drag on and on and on instead of just making a decision.
And then the fourth thing that kind of goes under this decision fatigue is indecision. This is like the... What do you call it? "Paralysis by analysis."
Like my example with my son and the monster trucks at the very start, there's just so many options that you're like, "Oh, do I get this one? Oh, but what if I get that one? Oh, let me figure out the pros and cons..." And then you sit in this pros and cons list forever, going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.
For my son, it can be, "Oh, but I've got Grave the monster truck. Do I have the one with yellow wheels? But maybe I want Spider-Man Monster truck." And it's just like... it's actually draining you now.
Years and years ago, there was this other study I remember looking at called the "Jam Experiment."
And when it gave people, it was like free jam tastings in a supermarket and when they had like 30 different flavours or I don't know the exact numbers, you can look it up. The Jam experiment and it was about choice and that people get overwhelmed if there's like 30 different flavours of jam. They actually sold less of that jam than when there was like six flavours for people to choose from.
So the same can go in business. If you've got a million different options for things. It's like, oh, gosh, I don't know. I don't know what we should do. And so that is where working with a business coach or working with somebody else to help you work through those things can be so instrumental.
Now that indecision is the last one. So, I mean, they're not in any particular order, but these four that I talked about, ah, are procrastination, impulsivity, avoidance and indecision. So I guess the key is recognising which of these four you sort of generally lean towards as a business owner.
But also maybe in a particular situation you may be like, okay, I've just got decision fatigue right now. So I know that I'm completely avoiding or I'm just making this choice and I'm not necessarily happy with the choice, but I just don't even have the time to think about whether I'm happy or not. We just have to do it.
And sometimes that's just reality, it just has to happen. But it's good if you can catch yourself and just become aware of this. And maybe, for example, if you just need to make it a choice instead of going, okay, I just need to make something now, whatever, give yourself a bit of time, like, okay, let me sleep on it and within 24 hours we'll have made a decision. But I'm going to, within that 24 hours, do some consideration, research, etc.
So that's, I guess the first thing is to think about what is your normal pattern of decision fatigue of those four kind of ways of managing it and then look for a strategy to kind of combat it or work through it.
So one of the examples that I was thinking of when I was coming up with this episode is recently my new VA who is just wonderful. And shout out to her. I think she'll be listening to this as she's editing things.
But we were talking for a couple of weeks on different platforms. Now we have always had our systems set up in Asana. I've had Asana since 2016, so almost 10 years and I've always used Asana. Now I've kind of got a bit sick of Asana and also they've put their prices up and their customer service is just not the greatest.
So I had moved some of the things out of Asana to Milanote. I did an episode about that in my clients. With my clients I always use Trello. I just think it's one of the easiest for people to get their heads around. And again I've used Trello since maybe 2015, 2016. Oh yeah, I'm not sure exactly but probably close to 10 years.
Trello on the flip side have always been super wonderful to deal with. They're just amazing. And so yep, that's great. But I wanted to keep our SOPs, our systems, our tasks management, project management, content stuff out of Trello because when I'm in Trello I'm in client mode. When I'm in Asana, I mean you know, working on my business mode.
So I wanted to move out of Asana with this new VA we had talked about okay, do we go to ClickUp Notion Monday? You all of the different ones. And they had decided that maybe we'd go to ClickUp. Anyway, we were going back and forth, back and forth and we're on a call recently and I said you know what, we just need to get one of them set up.
So I don't really mind what it is but we just need to get something set up. But I could tell that this was a bit overwhelming to them and fair enough, you know, they're new to a business and I thought okay, let me shoulder the responsibility of this.
And I thought I've got about an hour, until I needed to be doing something. And so I was like, okay. I said to them give me the hour. I'm goingna spend the first 20 minutes researching and just checking that these different platforms, you know which one can do what I know about these platforms. I work with clients who use these platforms.
So it's not like I was a complete stranger to this. Maybe if I was, I might've said, okay, give me 24 hours and I will go down a YouTube rabbit hole and I will figure this out. Or I'll use an AI tool to decipher. Okay, these are the things I need. These are different platforms, which one's gonna be best for me.
This is exactly why using AI can really, really help. Anyway, I said, give me an hour and I will do the research and I will make a decision. So I have this thing called the 40-minute test. I mean I just sort of made it up. It's my own thing that I think a lot of things can get done in 40 minutes.
And so I thought, okay, give me 20 minutes to research and then 40 minutes to set it up. And let's see if I can set it up within 40 minutes. Now we had a lot of our SOP already done. We have a whole bunch of our systems boards, we had a CSV file, we have a whole bunch of things. Plus I've been doing the same sort of business for almost 10 years.
So I got off the call, I watched a couple of tutorials. I did use my Poppy AI tool. I put in a couple of YouTube clips into PoppyI. I asked a bunch of questions, I gave it voice notes and some other things. I gave it examples of, our past boards. I had a screen grab of what our Asana board looked like. I put it all in and I decided, along with some help from Bobby, that I think Monday.com would be good.
Now, Poppy actually didn't decide this. This was based on a couple of YouTube videos I watched. And I thought, okay, you know what, let's just use Monday.com. I went to Monday.com and thought, can I set this up within 40 minutes? It literally took about 15 minutes to start setting it up in a way that we could start using it immediately. Shout out to Monday.com if you ever wanna sponsor me. Feel free.
But I am finding Monday, since we started using it now for, I don't know, a week or so, has been so user, friendly, so easy to create things. It's kind of got some of the best parts of notion have been pulled into Monday. it is just really, really good, really easy. I like the colour coordination, I like tagging things. It works well with my brain.
But the idea is that within 40 minutes can you actually do something? Sometimes we can put off things and we can go and procrastinate and go back and forth on stuff for ages, as I had done with this woman. Not ages. It had been like a couple of weeks, but still we were going back and forth, back and forth.
Instead of just going, this needs to be decided, let's just do it. And I was like, I've got one hour to get it done. So I think that setting a hard deadline, but also within that hour, it wasn't like I just jumped in, it was like, let's go and research, let's use AI, let's do a, YouTube search, let's have a look at these things, let's see what it actually need to do.
And I'd also had the knowledge of what different tools can do for business because I work with so many business owners and I see their systems and I helped them create these systems and I'd seen the backend of different tools.
But I have to say that Monday has definitely made a bunch of changes recently. That's what I feel because as I said, I looked at it a year ago and it definitely hadn't got the capabilities that it has now. So this isn't an ad for Monday, but it's an ad for the 40-minute test, which is sometimes with a decision, ask yourself, could I do something with this decision and move it forward within 40 minutes? And most often you can.
So that was an example from my real world of really going, this has to be made. This is actually preventing us from just getting on and working together. So what is it? And currently at this exact point when I'm recording, I'm really happy with Monday.com.
Also, I should just say with this 40-minute test for yourself, this 40-minute idea, you don't have to do everything within that 40 minutes. This was phase one. It was, let's choose it, let's get the Basics app into this system. Like let's get our tasks table set up, let's get our SOPs for the core parts of the business in there and let's get all of the video tutorials and some other things linked in there.
Now these already, already exist in Dropbox. So it was just a case of finding those links and putting them in. So it could be, this is phase one, that could be done, then this is phase two and when does that get done? And setting yourself an implementation deadline.
So this same thing could be done whether you are choosing a new email marketing platform, whether you are deciding on pricing structure, if you're hiring people, if you are deciding to jump into a new marketing platform. Like so often, we can just sit in this idea of either procrastination, avoidance, or indecision. Instead of going, "Okay, let me have a concentrated effort to research and decide, and then let me take an action."
And for me, I find that a lot of that can be done within 40 minutes. But you might decide it's a 24-hour or a three-day process, and you're like, "It's a three-day process, and I've given myself enough time, and I know that for me, three days works."
The other thing with this is understanding yourself. Now, this is a big part of what I work on with people. We often look at 16 personalities. We talk about, "What sort of life do you want to create?" This whole business that I have is supporting my life, not the other way around. I'm very much, "Let's create a business that's supporting the lifestyle and life that you want to have," as opposed to having your entire life trying to support your business.
But the next part to think about is yourself and how do you best work, and when do you best make those decisions. So in the British Journal of General Practice, they said that most people have a finite amount of mental energy before our brain starts looking for shortcuts.
And those shortcuts, like I said before with that impulsivity, can just be, "You know what, like I was about to swear then, you know it, let's just make a decision and be done with it."
And so you want to think about for you, how do you best work, when do you have your most energy, when are you most excited about things? I said before that lots of people's mental energy depletes as the day goes on.
But some people have like a second wind that comes in in the evening, and they’re like night owls. They can make incredible decisions late at night. For other people, that doesn’t happen; it happens more in the morning. So you want to think about, is it true for you that decisions get harder as the day progresses? That’s kind of what the British journal was saying.
It could also say that they did have some study or research talking about how we tend to be more conservative in our choices and take fewer risks when we are fatigued. Which is interesting, because I would’ve thought that impulsivity is really kind of sometimes taking risks—like, “Let’s just do it that way, whatever, to get it off my plate.” But they were saying that, actually, we tend to be more conservative and risk-averse the more fatigued we are.
So with small business, obviously, you have to take a risk to start a small business. And you’re then constantly taking risks throughout the life of the business. For some people, those are huge risks, and for others, they’re smaller. But you have to take certain risks in order to keep a business afloat. And so, you want to be not fatigued and not thinking super conservatively to do that.
It’s the same with marketing. People can come up with really fun marketing ideas when they are not fatigued. But when you are fatigued, it’s like, “Ugh, I can’t be bothered. Let’s just do the same thing that we did last year at this time, or for this season, or for this campaign.” So there is also a tendency to take the path of least resistance.
You want to think about when you are at your best for making decisions. Is there a time of day when you’re better at making them? Is it better for you to leave things to the next day and make them by like 10:00 AM or 11:00? When is it? Is it in the early morning?
I go for walks a lot. I document them a lot on Instagram if you're following me. And I love thinking over things on that walk. Often, you wake up in one mindset, and then go for my big walk, and come back and be like, “Actually, I’ve thought about that and this is the decision.”
So, I know that I’m good in the morning. I’ve always worked morning jobs before I started my business. I’ve always lived away from where I work, so it’s always been a long commute. I’ve always had to get up early. I used to work at cafes and all sorts of things. And so, I know that I’m pretty good in the morning. I’m okay in the evening, but I would much rather just be done with work and start my night with my kids, my family, or just myself to relax.
I’m definitely not somebody who likes to come into the office. I never really do come into the office in the evening to work. I will if I absolutely have to, but that doesn’t happen very often, luckily, because I’ve set my business up well. But that’s the kind of thinking about you and the science behind you in particular.
So, how does your brain function? How does your lifestyle function? Maybe you work in the evenings and sleep during the day. What does it look like for you, and when is the best time? It might even be a particular day. I know, for example, I’ve always had Wednesdays off for years and years and years.
My youngest son is actually starting primary school next year, so I’m like, “Wow, I could actually work on a Wednesday if I wanted to.” I don’t want to, so I probably won’t. But I love having Wednesdays because it’s my time to think about bigger things around the house. Do I want to fix that part of the house? Or when am I going to paint that part? It gives me that brain space.
So, I’ll often park things in my personal life until a Wednesday because I’m like, “Yeah, I’ve got the brain capacity to do it because I’ve got the day off.” That can be something you may think about—there may be a particular time of the week that you have a bit of time to yourself, or you can really think.
It sounds so silly to say you need time to think, but you really do. We have so many things going on all the time—go, go, go—and our brains need the time to rest in order to make those great decisions.
I guess then with all of this, it’s like, “Okay, how do I overcome this? How do I work through this?” Well, we’ve talked about the four different elements of decision fatigue—understanding which one you're more likely to connect with, or how you usually make decisions. Then I talked about my real-life example.
We’ve talked about uncovering who you are as a person, the time of day, the day of the week that you may be able to fire on all cylinders and make better decisions. But the next part is to think about solutions to this. Is it about a timeline? Is it about implementing deadlines? Is it about streamlining choices?
For example, people often ask me which website provider I think they should use. Now, there’s a whole bunch of variables to this. I’m a huge fan of Squarespace, including Squarespace Commerce. I love Squarespace. I use Squarespace myself. I’ve often recommended it to many clients, especially service providers.
But obviously, there’s Shopify if you are into e-commerce. There are so many platforms. But I will often say, “What other tools are you already using?” Because often, you want your website to connect and integrate seamlessly with your email provider and other tools that you have going on.
Because when it doesn't, it can be really hard to have workarounds. You end up with all of these Zapiers and other tools, and you have to make sure that every single tech tool is being updated at the same time. You also need to check that they're always working. So, it's really good to streamline things.
You may say, "Okay, I'm working with Klaviyo as an email provider" or "I have ConvertKit or ActiveCampaign or Mailchimp." Then, you want to think about which platforms integrate easily with the email platform you're using. Maybe you've built up a massive blog or email list. It could also be that you sell courses.
So, you have to think about: If I'm not going to build my website on Kajabi, Thinkable, Teachable, or Thinkific, which platform is easiest to connect with where I'm selling my courses? For me, we're looking at Squarespace for courses because we've been using Kajabi for ages. Just a side note.
But that’s thinking about streamlining your choices. Once you decide which website provider integrates seamlessly with Klaviyo or Mailchimp, that will streamline things. It will reduce the number of choices you have to make. You can then go, "Okay, well, this is a factor I need to tick off." So, these are the three website providers to choose from. It helps take away some of the indecision, that feeling of "there are too many options," which can lead to paralysis by analysis.
Another thing that helps is delegation. Being able to delegate some of the tasks can really make a difference. It's not just about handing everything off to someone else and letting them shoulder all the responsibility. It's about thinking, "I only have this much mental capacity, so do I have other people who work for me? What decisions can they make that won't negatively impact the business?"
Think about whether you can have team members step up and make those decisions. Often, that can be really empowering for that team member. I had a similar conversation with my new VA. I asked them to analyze something, and they gave me a full breakdown, which was great. But then I said, "I actually just wanted your opinion on this."
I totally understood the breakdown, and that was helpful. But what I really wanted was their expertise. They've been doing this for a long time and have worked with all sorts of people in the VA role. I wanted to know: "What would be your opinion on this?" They gave it to me, and I think they were happy to contribute.
It also helped connect us because it’s like, "Yes, you're a huge part of this team, too." It's not just me delegating every single thing. I want to know what you think, what you feel, and how you think we should handle this. Sharing that decision-making can be super helpful.
Another thing that can really help is the idea of "fresh eyes." As I mentioned earlier, maybe you're someone who wants to sleep on things. I definitely do that myself—I'll say, "Give me tonight, I’m going to sleep on it. I'll go for my walk in the morning, and then I'll come back to it with fresh eyes."
I used to do this a lot when I was a journalist. I’d write articles and then leave them for a while—sometimes a day—before coming back to read them. I used to be an editor for books and a proofreader, and this "fresh eyes" approach worked wonders in that capacity as well. When you're so close to something, your mind and eyes can miss things. But if you give yourself time and come back to it, it can make a big difference, especially if it’s not urgent.
You can give yourself some time—maybe three days, maybe until the end of the week, or even until the end of the month or year if it’s not urgent. Set a deadline, then give yourself time to really think about it.
It could also be something you talk through with a business friend, or in a group coaching program. We have one open right now, by the way. It might also be something you discuss with your good friends. The key is really taking the time to get a fresh perspective—it can be super important.
The other thing to think about is something you hear a lot about—like Steve Jobs always wearing the same outfit, or Obama talking about his consistent suits or shirts. Mark Zuckerberg, too, until his recent style overhaul, used to just wear the same hoodie, jeans, and sneakers.
That could be something that helps you too. You see a lot of videos on capsule wardrobes and style, where people talk about figuring out your key pieces. The same concept applies to other parts of your life. Maybe you think, "I don’t want to make decisions around food."
I can relate to that. Shout-out to Youfoodz! I don’t know if anyone’s tried it, but when I had my second child, I knew that between looking after him, trying to manage preppy, and my dad being in a nursing home and dying, I wouldn’t have the capacity to think about what's for dinner.
So, straight after I had my second child, I ordered a bunch of Youfoodz.
And I think we used YouFoods for like months because, not for the kids. We made food for them, but predominantly for me, but also my husband. It was like, let's just have YouFoods because you can just chuck it in the microwave, and I don't have to think. It's just done. I can eat whenever because it's all there, and I don't have to think about, "Oh, I've got to go to the shops, and I've got to get this and that."
Also, Dinner Ladies. I had Dinner Ladies on the podcast. Much nicer than YouFoods, I have to say. Much more delicious food. But Dinner Ladies has also helped massively. My good friend sent it to me after my mum died, and that was a beautiful gesture because it was like, I don’t have the brain space to even think about what I’m cooking for dinner.
So, thinking about, if you're at work, in your business, you've got so many decisions to make all the time. What else around your life can be delegated or outsourced? That is going to help you have to make fewer decisions across the whole day.
So, I guess this is it for today. I know I've kind of gone into different parts, but I want you to really think about where does decision fatigue show up for you with those four things that I mentioned: procrastination, impulsivity, indecision, and avoidance. Which one are you generally often using in your business and in your life? And then what are the solutions that you can put in place for this?
For me, often it is a deadline—a time deadline. I think one of the best things about having kids is that they force you to have time deadlines. Because I have to go, I have to go and pick them up from school. I have to go, and I want to do this as well. And I get to, and I'm very happy. But I have a finite amount of time that I can be sitting on my computer or thinking about things.
Same with social media. I have a finite time. I have a deadline for how many minutes I get to spend on that per day. And so we all can put in place these restrictions and these times, and it’s just us having to stick to them. Setting your own boundaries and sticking to that stuff.
For me, timing and deadlines work really well for making decisions. For other people, it may be dissecting it with a whole bunch of other friends. For others, it may be, you know, a three-week process. But figure out what is your process and then try and implement that. Be like, “Okay, that’s how we’re going to do it,” and let’s see if it works. If it doesn't, you can always adjust and change.
But decision fatigue is absolutely real, even at this time of year when everyone’s excited and has momentum. But it’s real. So figure out how you’re going to deal with it because it is a huge part of small business. It can be something that holds you back and hinders you.
But I hope after today, you have some ideas and thoughts in place as to how you’re going to manage it as part of running a small business.
So that is it for today. If you want to go through this in text format, you can find that, plus all the links to anything I mentioned, including group coaching (which is open) at MyDailyBusiness.com/groupcoaching. You can check all of that out, but you can find all of the show notes, including everything I've just mentioned at MyDailyBusiness.com/podcast480.
Thank you so much for listening.
I'll see you next time. Bye.
Thanks for listening to the My Daily Business Podcast for a range of tools to help you grow and start your business, including coaching programmes, courses and templates. Cheque out our shop at mydailybusiness.com and if you want to get in touch, you can do that by email at hello@mydailybusiness.com or you can hit us up on Instagram at mydailybusiness_. You can find us on TikTok at mydailybusiness or find me Fiona Killackey on LinkedIn. I look forward to connecting.
