Have you ever taken a moment to think about how many decisions you make in a day? Social life, family, school, career, sports, finances, health, clothes, meals . . .

That’s what I was thinking about the other day when I was feeling total decision overload, facing another handful of decisions the other day – while planning dinner. As soon as the school year starts, life gets exponentially busier. We have sports. We have dance class. We have bowling. We have other after school stuff, like test prep.

When you’re so busy, you can become overloaded. And I realized that a big part of that is all of the decisions you have to make.

And guess what? I thought the number of decisions we make in a day would be maybe in the high hundreds. Then, I researched it, and it turns out we make around 35,000 decisions daily.

That’s how much of our life is about making choices. 

Imagine how much mental bandwidth all of those decisions take up….

And get this, we make over 200 decisions on food alone each day, according to researchers at Cornell University. 

But that food number kind of didn’t surprise me either…  

Meals are a bit of a struggle in our family. I also think it’s not unusual for a busy family to have this problem. Our struggle might seem surprising to some of you, considering my husband John is a chef. But it’s also unfair to expect him to plan meals at home when that’s what he does all day for work. Also, he’s been traveling a lot lately. So we’ve been trying to create a system and a plan where we’re all involved in preparing meals in some capacity. Something that frees up our bandwidth as parents for our bigger goals as a family, rather than getting fatigued by the smaller decisions.

I’m trying to find a system, like a routine, that makes it easier on us all. Any other parents out there constantly think, “I can’t believe I have to plan dinner… again”?

Making smart decisions as another way of working smarter, not harder. Because if you try to put energy on everything, then everything suffers. And nothing good really comes from that. It can even be stressful.

I’ll admit that we’re still experimenting to figure out something that works. Like many busy families, we’re a work in progress.

A friend told me that this is why Mark Zuckerberg wears a gray shirt every day. It frees his mental bandwidth towards other things. It makes it easier for him to focus his energy on the bigger decisions when he doesn’t have to make fashion decisions.

Mark Zuckerberg explained in an interview, “I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community. There’s actually a bunch of psychology theories that even making small decisions, around what you wear or what you eat for breakfast or things like that, kind of make you tired and consume your energy.”

Now, I’m not Mark Zuckerberg. So I will never just wear a gray shirt every day. I like making the decision of how I’m going to show up that day. But I do understand the concept of decisions taking up energy.

I looked up “decision fatigue,” and it is something that really happens in our brain. Over the course of a day, the more decisions we have to make, the more mentally depleted we become – to the point that decision overload can actually turn into cognitive impairment and exhaustion. It can even get to the point that we feel we almost can’t handle one more decision.

I think everyone reading this has probably experienced this at least once in one area or another.

Last week, I was planning to meet a friend for lunch and they asked me what I wanted to do. My response was, “What I want is to not make another decision.” Half kidding, I finished with, “Just tell me where you want to meet me, and I’ll meet you there.” At that moment, I felt like I was experiencing textbook “decision fatigue.”

When that happens, I think we just have to make an assessment of what can give – where can we make more efficient decisions in our life? So, while I’m not about to start wearing a gray shirt, I am looking for ways to set up some systems and processes that make some of our household’s smaller daily decisions take up less of my bandwidth. Because all of those decisions add up. I mean – there’s 35,000 of them, right?!

As we’re problem-solving to make our meal planning more efficient, here’s how we’re starting. This might be helpful for anyone else who feels like they have a LOT of decisions on their plate too.

I’m writing down what we’re trying to accomplish. I’m idea dumping on a piece of paper, making it like a problem-solving mind map with a question at the top. My question is, how can we all work together to make home-made and nutritious meals more effortless in our house?

When the question is on the paper in front of you, you can see what you are trying to do and write out all of the options. Then, you can start narrowing down options. That gets your plan started by process of elimination. Also, crossing things off this list gives you a little shot of dopamine that is so satisfying.