Why you are making three-month decisions in three minutes

In my work as a life coach, one of my clients runs a private equity firm. He is smart and experienced, the sort of person you would want beside you in a difficult board meeting, and a few months into our work, he said something I remember well.

"I am taking decisions in three minutes that should take thirty, and I am sitting on decisions for three months that I should have made in three weeks. Both, in the same week, and I cannot work out which one is worse."

That is decision fatigue in two sentences. It shows up at the fast end and at the slow end, and although they look like opposite habits, they come from the same place. From the outside, it rarely looks like indecision. It looks like a great many small decisions made in a hurry, and a few big ones that never get made at all.

Why it happens

Every decision costs a little energy, and a senior person makes hundreds in a day, most of them small and a few of them very large. By Thursday afternoon there is not much left to draw on, so the mind reaches for whatever pattern is nearest. For some people, that means deciding quickly just to clear the desk; for others, it means putting the decision off until next week. Plenty of people do both, depending on the topic, which is exactly what my client described.

Anyone who has sat through a week of back-to-back meetings knows the feeling. If you recognise yourself here, please do not read it as a flaw in your character or a lack of discipline. Most of the senior people I work with have been asking more of their minds than rest ever gives back, and they have been doing it for years, usually without anyone pointing it out.

What changes it

Three things can change it, and I tend to tackle them in this order.

The first is rest: sleep, energy, and the hour after waking and the hour before bed. Nothing else holds until you look after these, and most advice about better decision-making is a distraction until they are in place.

The second is the number of decisions landing on your desk. Often a good share of them should not be yours, and this is rarely down to poor delegating. The business has grown or shifted around you, and nobody has redrawn the lines since. We look at where the lines sit now and move them, so fewer decisions pass through you and the ones that remain get your full attention.

The third is the set of decisions you have been avoiding, the three-month ones. There is nearly always something underneath them, such as a fear of the answer, loyalty to someone who depends on things staying as they are, or a hope that the problem will sort itself out if you wait long enough. Ignoring them does not make them lighter. They get heavier each month, and they take up room in your head even on days you don't touch them.

Where to start this week

Here are three small things to try on your own.

Write down the decisions you have been putting off, all of them, even the ones that feel too small to mention, and look at how long each has been sitting there. Then notice when in the day you make your hurried, poor decisions, because for most people they bunch up after three in the afternoon. Finally, pick one decision from your list that could belong to someone else, and ask yourself who that would be and what has stopped you from handing it over.

Most people find the list shorter than they feared and the reasons behind it more telling than the decisions themselves. If you try this and the same decisions are still sitting there a few weeks later, or if you can see what is holding you back but cannot move on on your own, that is the point to consider reaching out for support.

What this client did

We started with his sleep and his week, and then we went through where his decisions were coming from, which ones were his to make and which ones had drifted onto his desk. Once that was clear, we turned to the decisions he had been avoiding, and I asked the questions he had not been asking himself until he could see what was really holding each one back. He set the direction at every step, and I stayed alongside him while he did the harder part: acting on what he found.

Six months later he told me he was making fewer decisions and taking longer over each one, and that the ones he had been avoiding were either made or well on their way. His team seemed happier, his sleep had come back, and he said it felt as if a huge weight had come off his shoulders. He still ran the firm, but he no longer dreaded the week ahead.

If any of this sounds familiar, you don’t have to work through it alone. A coach can offer decision-making support, helping you explore what may be holding you back, gain clarity and feel more confident about the way forward.