By three in the afternoon you're wrecked, and you can't point to one hard thing you did.
That's usually the tell. It wasn't the work. It was the fifty small forks you took at full effort — what to eat, which email first, gym or couch, this tab or that one. Individually trivial. Collectively expensive.
Psychologists call the result decision fatigue. What's less obvious is how it shows up. You don't stop deciding. You just decide worse: avoiding, deferring, picking whatever's nearest and calling it a preference.
The fix isn't better judgement. It's fewer judgements.
Sort your choices before you make them
Three buckets.
High stakes. Changing jobs. Moving city. Anything with a real price tag or a consequence you can't walk back. These get the full treatment — research, a night's sleep, someone you trust to argue with.
Medium stakes. What to wear to the interview. Whether to commit to the Tuesday night class. Worth thinking about, not worth a spreadsheet.
Low stakes. Coffee. Route to work. What's on tonight. These should cost you nothing.
Most of what fills a day is the third kind handled with the intensity of the first. That mismatch is the whole problem, and noticing it is most of the cure.
Decide once, not daily
The best thing you can do with a recurring small choice is make it in advance, while you're fresh, and never make it again.
If the place has decent reviews and we can walk there, we go. Finish before five, gym; after five, home. Coffee: the usual.
Written down these look trivial. They aren't. A rule turns a daily two-minute deliberation into a zero-second lookup, and it does it using the judgement you had at your best rather than the judgement you have at six on a Thursday.
Speed is correct for anything reversible
Jeff Bezos splits decisions by whether you can undo them. It's a better cut than big versus small.
Wrong restaurant, you leave. Wrong shirt, you return it. Wrong Tuesday class, you stop going. The cost of getting these wrong is roughly the cost of the fix, which is roughly nothing — so the only real waste is the time you spent choosing.
Irreversible is different. Careers, mortgages, people. Take as long as you need there.
Most of us have this precisely backwards: an hour on dinner, an afternoon on the flat.
Some things have no right answer
You're often not stuck because the choice is hard. You're stuck because you've assumed one option is correct and you haven't found it yet.
The place down the street or the one four blocks over. Both are restaurants. Both have food. Neither is going to bend the arc of your life.
Once you accept there's no right answer, choosing arbitrarily stops feeling like giving up. That's the entire premise behind spinning a wheel for dinner. The wheel isn't clever and doesn't need to be. It just ends the search.
Learn the conditions where you're bad at this
Everyone has a state in which their judgement falls apart. Yours is worth knowing.
Some people spiral when hungry. Some when anxious. Some rush badly in company, because hesitating in front of other people feels like weakness.
Watch yourself for a week. When do you waste the most time choosing, and when do you regret what you chose? Then build around it. If hunger wrecks you, eat first and decide after. If tiredness does, move anything that matters to the morning.
Put a clock on it
Give yourself a window — two minutes for something small, an hour for something middling. When it's up, you choose with what you have.
This works because it makes the real constraint visible. You were never going to get complete information. You were going to keep looking for it.
When to actually think hard
Not everything should be fast. Slow down for:
Anything touching values. How you want to spend your time. Who you want to be. Strategy, not tactics.
Anything with a long tail. Moving, career, study, relationships. Consequences that compound deserve attention.
Anything your gut is flagging. If something feels wrong and you can't say why, that's information, not noise.
Anything that lands on someone else. If your choice costs another person something, they get a say, and you get to take the time.
Here, deliberating isn't fatigue. It's the job.
Start ridiculously small
Pick the least consequential thing you'll face today and decide it in under two minutes. Notice that nothing bad happens.
Do it again tomorrow. The confidence compounds faster than you'd expect, and the category of things you don't need to think about quietly grows.
Some of it you can hand off entirely. We built LMDFY on the premise that a lot of daily choices need speed rather than analysis: a restaurant wheel for the dinner argument, yes or no for binaries, a coin flip, a dice roller, a name picker for whose turn it is.
None of them make a good choice. They make a choice, which on a Tuesday night is usually the same thing.
So: pick one decision you know you overthink, and handle it in five minutes tomorrow. That's the whole practice.