How To Combat Decision Fatigue Using Simple Criteria

How many times during a day, week, month, or year, do you make decisions for your fitness business? The fitness industry is a fast-moving one and the future of fitness keeps evolving.

Or better yet, how many seconds, minutes, hours, days, and weeks do you spend pondering opportunities attempting to make an optimal business decision?

Chances are, you’re bombarded with opportunities such as creating partnerships with other fitness professionals, joining networking groups, doing lunch and learns, diversifying your revenue through brand ambassadorships, affiliateships, distributorships, and becoming a vendor for fitness-related products. How about decisions related to building your team, maintaining and growing your facility, and other strategic planning choices?

As a person living in a fast-past culture, driven by technology, data, and information, how many times do you find yourself pressed to make speedy decisions? These can be simple decisions such as choosing what to wear for the day, what to eat for meals, or even which route is the fastest during your daily routine. They can also be bigger life decisions such as buying a home or starting a family.

Having to make so many choices is referred to as decision fatigue (Leland, 2012).

Decision Fatigue is defined as is the wearing down of the brain’s mental capacity and stamina due to having too many options and the efforts it takes to make choices about these options. These choices can be daily decisions or high-level ones.

A technique to combat decision fatigue is by creating criteria that serve as a sort of a conveyer belt to run decisions through. This will allow you to streamline your decision-making process creating simplicity and clarity in your business.

As fitness professionals and business owners, using criteria to create simplicity when making decisions can be valuable by saving you time, energy and brainpower both on a short and long-term basis.

In order to effectively combat decision fatigue, try filtering your decision through the following criteria:

1) Does this opportunity improve the quality of my life?

2) Does it move me closer to my fitness professional business goals?

3a) Is this opportunity an investment in my future success in my business?

3b) If so, what’s the return on investment for this opportunity?

3c) About how long will it take for me to potentially see the return on investment?

3d) Do I have enough cash flow to make this investment and to withstand the time it takes to see the return on investment from it?

4a)  Do I have resources such as time, energy, and staff (as applicable) to follow through on this opportunity?

4b) If I don’t have the resources to follow through on this opportunity what am I missing, and can I procure it so that I can follow through on this opportunity?

 

Take time to honestly answer these questions. You can physically write the answers out, type them in a word processor, or even use a mobile-on on-the-go app. It doesn’t matter the platform, it only matters to do it! It may take some time upfront since you’ll be creating a new habit or pattern of thinking.

Think of this is short-term pain for long-term gain. If you start to run opportunities through this criteria regularly, eventually it will become second nature. Then you can enjoy the results of preventing brain drain as a result of decision fatigue by having a streamlined process!

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References:

Leland, K. (2012, Jan. 5). Your Small Business Brain and Decision Fatigue. Psychology Today. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-perfect-blend/201201/your-small-business-brain-and-decision-fatigue