How To Outsmart Decision Fatigue: 3 Strategies for Clearer Thinking

Summary

Summary of "How To Outsmart Decision Fatigue: 3 Strategies for Clearer Thinking"

Nonprofit Mastermind Podcast
Host: Brooke Richie-Babbage
Episode Release Date: July 1, 2025

In this episode of the Nonprofit Mastermind Podcast, host Brooke Richie-Babbage addresses a common yet often overlooked challenge faced by nonprofit leaders: decision fatigue. Drawing from her extensive 25-year experience in the social impact sector, Brooke offers practical strategies to mitigate decision fatigue, enabling leaders to think more clearly and lead more effectively, especially during the demanding mid-year period.

---

Understanding Decision Fatigue

Decision fatigue is described as a state of mental exhaustion resulting from the constant need to make decisions, both big and small. Brooke explains that nonprofit leaders are particularly susceptible due to the multifaceted nature of their roles, which require juggling strategic decisions like staff management and budget allocations alongside everyday choices such as meal planning or email prioritization.

“Decision fatigue is that sense of subtle mental exhaustion that hits you when your brain is just done for the day.” [04:45]

As a result, leaders may experience decreased clarity, slower thinking processes, and a tendency to either avoid decisions or make quick, reactive choices rather than thoughtful ones.

---

The Mid-Year Danger Zone

Brooke identifies mid-year as a critical period where decision fatigue commonly intensifies. Contrary to the notion that mid-year should be a breather with longer days and warmer weather, it often feels like a "pressure cooker" time. Several factors contribute to this:

1. Erosion of Initial Momentum: The initial energy and enthusiasm from the beginning of the year have dwindled, leading to feelings of tiredness and decreased motivation.

   “The adrenaline of the first part of the year is long gone... it's June, July, we're tired.” [02:10]

2. Undefined Priorities: As the year progresses, priorities can become murkier, making it harder to focus on what truly matters.

3. Lagging Year-End Urgency: The impending pressures of the year-end goals haven't fully set in, creating a messy middle ground where ongoing projects feel less urgent but still demand attention.

4. Increased Cognitive Load: Balancing execution of goals, unexpected challenges like staffing gaps, and maintaining team performance can spike cognitive load, leading to decision fatigue.

---

Strategies to Combat Decision Fatigue

Brooke outlines three actionable strategies to alleviate decision fatigue: Design Default Decisions, Setting Rules for Yourself, and Shrink Your Time Horizon.

1. Design Default Decisions

Concept: Reduce the number of micro-decisions by establishing default options for recurring tasks.

“Anything that you do more than twice needs a default.” [12:15]

Implementation:

• Scheduling: Assign specific days for repetitive tasks (e.g., Fridays dedicated to writing newsletters).
• Meeting Cadences: Pre-schedule regular meetings (e.g., Mondays for program check-ins, first Thursdays monthly for board updates) to eliminate the need for continuous planning.
• Standardized Processes: Use consistent frameworks for post-event debriefs by setting up templates and fixed timelines (e.g., completing debrief forms within 48 hours of an event).

Benefits: By converting recurring decisions into defaults, leaders can conserve mental energy for more critical tasks, thereby enhancing overall productivity and focus.

2. Setting Rules for Yourself

Concept: Establish personal rules that automate decisions and minimize internal negotiations, thereby reducing decision-making burden.

“These rules are like really compassionate constraints that you set up to prevent yourself from over-committing.” [18:50]

Implementation:

• Acceptance Criteria: Define clear criteria for accepting invitations or opportunities. For instance, “If it doesn’t advance our specific strategic priorities or strengthen our funding pipeline, it’s a no.”
• Work Boundaries: Set specific times for activities, such as not checking emails after 7 PM or taking a mandatory lunch break from 12 to 12:30 PM.
• Budget Adherence: Implement strict budget rules, e.g., “If it’s not already in the budget for this quarter, it’s not on the table.”

Benefits: These rules act as automatic decisions, freeing leaders from having to evaluate the same choices repeatedly and thereby reducing cognitive load.

3. Shrink Your Time Horizon

Concept: Focus on short-term goals rather than being overwhelmed by long-term challenges. By narrowing the scope of decision-making to the present moment or the immediate next step, leaders can manage their energy and maintain clarity.

“Temporary stop trying to solve the whole year... just solve today.” [24:10]

Implementation:

• Daily Focus: Instead of addressing the entire staff burnout issue at once, implement a temporary rule like ensuring staff stop working by 6 PM for the next two weeks.
• Incremental Steps: Break down large problems into smaller, manageable tasks. For example, rather than aiming to fix the entire board culture in one meeting, schedule three one-on-one conversations with board members.
• Specific Actions: In revenue planning meetings, focus on immediate actions like sending out five donor thank-you notes instead of tackling the entire revenue gap.

Benefits: This approach reduces anxiety and helps maintain focus by making large problems feel more manageable through concentrated, short-term actions.

---

Conclusion: Design Matters

Brooke reiterates that decision fatigue is a structural issue rather than a personal failing or leadership flaw. By implementing design defaults, setting personal rules, and narrowing the time horizon, nonprofit leaders can effectively reduce decision-making friction and preserve mental energy for strategic leadership.

“Decision fatigue is a design issue, not a leadership flaw.” [35:45]

She encourages leaders to use mid-year as an opportunity to pause, assess their organizational structures, and redesign processes to better support sustained clarity and impact through the remainder of the year.

---

Final Thoughts

Brooke concludes the episode by emphasizing the importance of structural redesign in combating decision fatigue. By proactively addressing the ways organizations are designed around constant decision-making, leaders can create a more sustainable and impactful work environment.

Listeners are also encouraged to subscribe to Brooke's newsletter, Leadership Forward 321, for additional insights, resources, and inspiration to further support their leadership journey.

---

Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• “Decision fatigue is that sense of subtle mental exhaustion that hits you when your brain is just done for the day.” [04:45]
• “Anything that you do more than twice needs a default.” [12:15]
• “These rules are like really compassionate constraints that you set up to prevent yourself from over-committing.” [18:50]
• “Temporary stop trying to solve the whole year... just solve today.” [24:10]
• “Decision fatigue is a design issue, not a leadership flaw.” [35:45]

---

This episode provides nonprofit leaders with practical tools to navigate the challenges of decision fatigue, particularly during the demanding mid-year period. By adopting these strategies, leaders can enhance their clarity, maintain their energy, and continue to drive their organizations toward greater impact without succumbing to burnout.

Transcript

[Brooke Richie Babbage]

So I want to ask you a personal question. Do you read my newsletter Leadership Forward 321? Because if you don't, I really think you'd like it. If you like this podcast Every week I send a short newsletter that you can read in five minutes or less designed to help you lead more strategically and with less overwhelm. I share a three part micro lesson on a timely leadership theme that you can apply right away, two concrete resources that I stand behind and a quote or reflection to inspire and motivate you. I'm going to make it super easy for you to sign up. You can text the word impact to 66866 and I'll add you to my list. Enjoy the episode. Mid year is sneaky. It feels like it should be a breather. Days are longer, everything's warmer. But it's actually this weird pressure cooker time where your to do list has been slowly getting bigger. Priorities are murkier than they were in January, and every decision starts to feel heavier than it should. If that's how you feel, you're experiencing decision fatigue and it's really common this time of year. Today I'm breaking down three simple ways to fix it welcome to the Nonprofit Mastermind Podcast. I'm Brooke Richie Babbage. I've been in the social impact game for 25 years as a social justice lawyer turned two time nonprofit founder and leader turned growth strategist and coach for leaders around the country. I grew my nonprofit from me and an intern in a tiny closet to a high impact seven figure organization. And along the way I learned so, so much about how to build an organization that has real impact and how to do it without burning out. In this podcast I share the nuts and bolts of all of it so you can do that too. We dive into the mindset, strategies and tactics of how to scale a high impact organization and how to do it in a way that's truly sustainable. I want to talk about decision fatigue because it's real and like I said in the intro, it's really sneaky. It shows up as lots of other things. We don't often realize that what we're experiencing is this cognitive collapse that can really undermine all of our best efforts right when we need to be sort of regrouping and gathering our energy and getting ready for the end of the year. Decision fatigue is that sense of sort of subtle mental exhaustion that hits you when your brain is just done for the day. You've spent all day making more decisions than you realize. Big ones like staff Stuff and navigating board dynamics and who to call and what to do about budget gaps and which funder you're going to reach out to first. And millions of tiny ones, like, what do I eat for lunch? Do I answer this email now or later? Do we actually need another meeting on that thing? Every single one of those is a decision. Your brain is processing it and working on it, and it adds up. And when your brain is overloaded like that, what happens is your clarity drops, your thinking slows down, and suddenly the things that should be simple feel weirdly hard. You either start avoiding decisions entirely or you make quick, reactive ones just to get them off your plate. Now, the good news is it's not because you're bad at leadership, and it's not because you can't handle the weight of running or stewarding your organization. It's just how the brain works, how everybody's brain works. The more responsibility you carry, the more vulnerable you are to it. It is a normal part of leadership, and it is also something we can design around. So I'm talking about it now because mid year is decision fatigue, danger zone. Here's what's happening under the surface. The adrenaline of the first part of the year is long gone, particularly like the January, February energy we come in with, you know, like, we've got our goals, gonna do all the things that's gone, right? It's June20, July, we're tired. The second thing is the urgency of year end hasn't fully kicked in yet. So we're in this weird, messy middle. We are juggling the grind of executing on goals and priorities that feel murkier and maybe honestly even a less. A little bit less important. So you're, you're still navigating the execution on those goals, even if you're feeling less motivated, less clear about them. Reality has set in. Maybe you're a little bit behind on certain types of revenue or conversations that you thought you were going to have with your board haven't quite happened yet because somehow you blinked and it's July. Your team is maybe hitting the goals that you set. Some of them are, some of them are not. Maybe you have a staffing gap that has emerged that you didn't anticipate, right? So all of this is this messy time of year. And just top it all off, everybody feels stretched and slow during the summer, right? Everybody's moving, despite the beauty of the days, just a little bit more heavily by the middle of the year. And so cognitive load spikes. That is what happens in people's brains, everybody's brains function that way. So if we accept the premise that mid year isn't this magical break time where suddenly the pressure is off, but actually it is experienced by most leaders as a really subtle pressure cooker in disguise, then decision fatigue, when it creeps in and it does that, it creeps in quietly, it feels brutal and it is not our fault. It's really important that we use mid year as a moment to pause, to recognize structurally what is falling apart, what is not holding us up, to reset our systems, to tighten our focus and to protect our energy, right? And if we recognize that what's happening is structural, it's about how we've designed our organization around us, then we can give ourselves permission to pause, reset, invest in redesigning now so that we can lighten some of the load as we move forward. So I want to give you three simple strategies that you can use right away to begin to help reduce decision fatigue and buy yourself a little bit of mental energy to do the reflection and the resetting and the figuring out where it's time to redesign so that you can respond to the urgency and the needs of the year end. So the first tool is design default decisions, right? You want to reduce choice friction, all of those little decisions you have to make by turning recurring decisions into what we call design defaults. So the basic idea here is that every recurring decision you leave open costs you mental energy. The defaults, when you set up these design defaults, they eliminate micro decisions. They eliminate these micro decisions that drain you unnecessarily. So think about it this way. Anything that you do more than twice, set a default, right? Anything you do more than twice needs a default. Defaults are standing decisions, right? You make a decision and they that decision holds until further notice. So you do not have to keep deciding. And by doing this, you remove friction and you free up your energy for other things for real leadership work. So a few examples are setting certain tasks for certain days, right? If your organization sends a newsletter, it's Friday. That's writing day. That's you don't have to decide every week, when am I going to fit in time for writing? Friday is writing day. Set meeting cadences in advance. Mondays are program check ins. First Thursday of every month are board updates. Get those in your calendar and don't think about them again and don't deviate from them and don't question them. They become protected time. You don't have to make a decision, right? And if something tries to conflict with those meetings that you've set. You're actually free to say, nope, can't do it because I've already made the decision. Right. You don't have to go back into these micro negotiations that slowly drain our energy. Another great way to set a design default is, is when you have a program event or a fundraising event or even a big meeting, any kind of event, where you have to do a debrief. Always use the same three questions or the same five questions after every event or after every campaign. Right? Set up a Google Doc, give people access to it who have to do the debrief and have those be the reflection questions. You know when you're going to answer them, right? Within 48 hours of our event. And we everybody goes in, fills out the debrief form. Within a week we have our meeting and that's it. Right? You've already decided what the cadence of your reflection is going to be. This is called choice architecture design. It is a way of removing invisible drains on your focus and your clarity. Tool number two is setting rules for yourself, eliminating these recurring negotiations that you have with yourself every time you have to make a choice. Because choices require active decision making. Even if it is a small choice like do I have an apple or a pear? That's an active decision you have to make. It feels small, but when you have 75 of them to make in a day, they add up, right? So you want to eliminate the small ones that you can, even some of the big ones. You just want to eliminate as many of the choices you have to make throughout the day as possible. What rules do is they turn these recurring negotiations into automatic boundaries. Right? You predetermine how you're going to protect your time and your energy and your focus. Every maybe becomes a pre decided automatic yes or no, right? These rules are think of them like really compassionate constraints that you set up to prevent yourself from over committing and to protect you from overwhelm in advance. So a few examples. Instead of should I accept this speaking invite? This is a big one that comes up a lot with the folks that I coach. Should I accept the speaking invite? Should I accept this invitation to join this coalition? You have a rule? I actually just had this conversation with one of the leaders that I coach. She was talking about not just showing up and sort of saying yes to the wrong things, but there's just so many of them that she has to decide. And it's exhausting in and of itself. And we actually talked through a set of rules. So for example, instead of should I accept this? The rule is if it doesn't advance our specific strategic priorities or strengthen our funding pipeline, it's a no. So you've automatically made some decisions in advance for you. You've set up a little mini decision frame for yourself. And as long as you don't change that decision frame, you've released yourself from having to make a choice. Right. Does it fit the criteria you set or not? Right. Yes or no? Other rules, I don't check email after 7pm Other rules I always take a lunch break and don't do any work from 12 to 1230. Another rule, if it's not already in the budget for this quarter, it's not on the table. Period. Right. We've already stretched our budget or we've already determined that in order to not get to the point where cash flow is an issue, we have to really stick to our budget. So we already decided if it's not in the budget, it's not on the table. Every leader needs a handful of these standing rules to reduce friction. And one of the things you can do mid year is take a look at the areas of your life that maybe need some of these rules. Okay? Third tool. Shrink your time horizon. Temporary stop trying to solve the whole year, honestly, even the whole month, and just solve today. Right? Or just solve the next step on your path. The idea here is that overwhelm is fueled when the time horizon gets too big. Zooming out to how are we going to solve our budget deficit problem? Or how do I solve my staff burnout problem? Or how do I fix our board culture? Right? Those are big problems with lots of steps that take a lot of time and effort. And even thinking about that question is overwhelming. So what you want to do is zoom in. Zooming into this week, zooming into today, into the next step is a powerful leadership move. That action alone lowers your anxiety and saves your energy by aiming it at very specific decisions. It reduces decision fatigue by reducing the scope of the decision. So shorter horizons make your priorities clearer and reduce your overwhelm. Examples I'm not solving the staff burnout problem this week. What I'm going to do is make sure that each person stops working no later than 6pm for the next two weeks. Right? Not going to solve the whole problem. I'm going to do this one thing. I'm not going to resolve the full year revenue gap in this meeting today. What I'm going to do is send five donor thank you notes because I know the donor stewardship is important. I don't need to fix the board culture right now. I don't know how to fix it right now. So what I'm going to do to narrow my scope is just set up three one on one conversations with board members. I'm going to take the next step, right? So these are examples of saying I recognize that there's a bigger thing, bigger set of decisions I need to make, but I'm narrowing the scope. I'm going to take very clear, narrow action. So I just want to circle back and drill home the point that decision fatigue is a design issue, not a leadership flaw. So the tools that I talked about today, the defaults, the rules, and shrinking the horizon are about reducing friction, reducing the number and scope of decisions. Your brain has to hold that weight that it has to hold and in doing so you free up your energy and your mind space for the the mid year clarity. So that's my advice for this week. I hope it was helpful. I will see you back here next week for more Mastermind. Thanks so much for joining me this week. If you enjoy this podcast, I would love for you to leave a rating and a review. I read every single one and they really do matter. I also share extra tidbits and resources building on what we talk about here in my newsletter, Leadership for 3, 2, 1. You can sign up by texting the word impact to 66866. And finally, definitely check out the links and resources that I mentioned this [e-mail] podcast see you next week.