Why Decision Fatigue Is Slowing You Down (And How to Speed Up)

You're listening to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast with Debbie Sassen, episode 170.

Welcome to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Debbie Sassen. I went from being a financial adviser, author and chronic under earner to building my business to six figures as a financial planner and money mindset coach, and then on to multiple six figures as a fulltime money and business coach. 

I help entrepreneurs create money making businesses and build wealth using sales and money mindset strategies in alignment with authentic Jewish values. Now, let's dive into today's show.

Hello my friends and welcome back to the podcast. This has been a very busy week for me. And as I moved through the week and thought about everything that I was doing, I said, you know, I make a lot of decisions during the course of the week. And so I thought to myself, this would be a great topic for this week's podcast: why decision fatigue is slowing you down and how you can speed up.

So first I started my week on Sunday, I had a photo shoot. It was absolutely so much fun in the freezing, freezing cold and I can't wait to get the pictures back. I know they're gonna turn out magnificent.

And then Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, I ran a masterclass, From Burnout to Making Bank, which by the way, if you weren't there, you really want to get the replay. It was a fantastic class. I worked creating new material that I have never presented before. And I really must say it was a masterpiece.

People have already purchased the replay, and the feedback is really, really on fire. This was a different level from any of the webinars and masterclasses that I have shared before. So go to my website, DebbieSassen.com/makebank and get yourself the replay, three full days, 60, 90 minutes, way more than 60 minutes, 90 minutes at least, speaking about your mindset to grow a multi six or seven figure business, your relationship with money and how to actually scale who you have to be as the leader of your business to grow a multi six or seven figure business, your relationship with money, and how to actually scale who you have to be as the leader of your business to grow a multi six or seven figure business. And this is just a teeny, teeny, tiny, you know, summary of everything that is inside. And I really do encourage you to get the masterclass.

Now, by the end of Wednesday, actually when I finished the masterclass, we had also celebrated in the morning, the bris, the circumcision ceremony for my youngest grandson, youngest grandchild. We now have, thank the good Lord, really, praise G-d, we have 20 grandchildren. We are so, so blessed.

We brought all the food back to our house afterwards, and my husband, who likes to clean things up very, very quickly, was like, what should we do with this? What should we do with that? And there was a lot, salads and cakes and bagels and things like that. And this is where I really felt like the decision fatigue was more than I could bear. It's like, sweetheart, I have a masterclass to run. You really want me to decide what I should do with these bagels, and every single one of these bits of food needed a decision.

Some of them we've already done by the time I'm recording this podcast, and who knows, maybe next week I will have moldy food in my refrigerator. But I digress. But it really occurred to me that many of us are drained by the end of the day because we're making so many decisions. From the moment you wake up, even your decision, do I hit snooze or do I get out of bed, right? Do I brush my teeth first or do I get dressed first? Do I have my coffee first?

Like, if you have an order to your day, and I really try not to leave my bedroom before I make my bed and clean up any clothing that is lying around, I don't want to have to make the decision to come back to my bedroom and straighten it up because I just won't do it. And I'll get there at the end of the day, I will have popped in and out to use the facilities, as they say, and my bedroom will probably still be a mess.

So wherever I can, I like to have a system and a process and eliminate decisions? And I have to say that I am not naturally wired to have systems and processes. My husband, I like to say he's not just type A, he is type A plus. He thrives. He thrives on this kind of material. And for me, it's always a struggle, but I do notice that when there is order, I can be more creative. My brain can have more creative capacity.

But if you are like me, many people listening to this podcast, you're running a business. You are a mom. You're a daughter. You're a wife. You're a sister, right? You have a lot of people who want your attention. You're a member of your community.

You probably have an endless to-do list and you are busy all day, every day, and you can even get to the end of the day and thinking, what did I even do today? Did I accomplish anything? And the truth of the matter is, you have been making decisions all day long. Hundreds, probably thousands of micro decisions all day long from what do you want with your coffee? Do you want it with milk and sugar? Do you want it black or do you want it with just milk? I drink my coffee with milk, sometimes black, never sugar. 

And then there's the schedules and the family and the schoolwork. If you have school kids at home, I don't have school kids at home anymore, but your clients have needs. You have to produce your podcasts and your emails and you have to think about content. Like really by the end of the day, we are on decision overload. 

So we're gonna talk about that today, how the decision fatigue is affecting your business. It's probably slowing down your business growth unless you come up with a strategy. And as moms who are also entrepreneurs, we are definitely even more affected than the guys. There is something called the leisure gap. We're going to be talking about that on the episode today. And it's really important that you understand what goes into your day and how it's impacting everything you do. 

And then I'm gonna share a three-part framework. It's a little similar to the four-part framework that I've already shared and you know and love from the podcast. I'm just simplifying it a little bit. Our brains, by the way, like to remember threes. So that's why I've simplified my framework from four Ds down to three so that you can leverage your time instead of just working and working and working. 

All right, so let's just talk about a little bit more about why decision fatigue is so fatigue creating. Fatigue-ness, fatiguing… fatiguing, I think that's the word, right? Basically, when you have decisions to make, you have an open decision loop, not deciding burns your mental energy. You still have choices. Is it a yes or a no? Is it do it now or do it later? And as you continue thinking about all these things, your brain is constantly working in the background.

So just for your business, you might be thinking, is it time for me to raise my prices? Would my client be best served by a three-month package or a six-month package? Should I offer a discount? What's coming up in the spring? Do I need to have a special promo for the Passover holidays? Like all these things are coming up in your mind. Like, do I already have my summer planned out? Am I going on summer vacation? Where do we want to go? Do we want to stay local? Do we want to go overseas? Do we want sea? Do we want mountains? Are we going to go hiking? Are we going to go swimming?

All of these decisions, some of them are big decisions that live in your brain. And then as a mom, right, we have even more decisions. Most of us are also holding all of the decisions for our families in our heads. Like who needs to go to soccer practice? Who is on antibiotics and what time did they take their next dose? Is it twice a day or three times a day? What about the dentist?

When my kids, you know, they're older, they're like, mommy, I need to go to the dentist. I'm like, great, pick up the phone and call the dentist and make an appointment. I don't even know when my kids are gonna be available to go to the dentist and I'm certainly not reminding them that they need to come home from their dorm on a bus and go to the dentist.

All of these things take up mental capacity in your brain. That's why at the end of the day, you're tired. Even thinking about what am I gonna make for dinner? If you don't have a menu plan, if there's not something scheduled, you'll probably find yourself face down in a package of potato chips because it's so much easier, even if opening a can of tuna is not much more work than opening a bag of potato chips, you'll be exhausted, you'll go for the sweet things, the salty things, the carb things. All right, we're not gonna get on to weight loss topics because that is not what I do for my business.

But I think that you understand, especially as a mom, because even when men and women, husbands and wives, are both working and they're working full time, they're running businesses, moms still take on about two thirds of the household responsibilities and the childcare responsibilities. Now, sometimes the mom can be the businesswoman, she's doing everything for the business, and the dad is like the Mr. Mom running the house, but most of the time, that's not what happens.

I have to give a big shout out to my husband because he really takes a lot of the work of the household off my shoulders. He does all of the shopping. He goes to the dry cleaners. Right, he does a lot and I'm so, so grateful. He doesn't do laundry and we split the dishes more or less. But still, I don't have to go into the supermarket. I find I get decision fatigue just from going to the supermarket.

So if you're with me, then I strongly suggest that you either do online shopping. I don't like online shopping. I always get about half of my order and the fruits and vegetables are never the same quality as when we pick it out by ourselves. But again, I digress, but you know what I'm talking about.

So number one, if you have a lot of things that you are carrying, and most of us do, if you're a businesswoman and you're ambitious, you want to achieve, you want to go places in your business, you're aiming to have a multi-six, seven-figure business, the most important thing that you can do is figure out how to leverage your time so that you're not the one making all the decisions.

First of all, if you go through your day and your week and you just write down all of the tasks you do on a daily basis, the emails, answering, deleting, sorting, what sort of client work? I have a Slack channel for my clients in my Wired for Wealth membership and my clients are also messaging me and they're asking for feedback. So I have my own stuff that I'm working on with my emails and my messages and things that come in in that channel. Then there's the Slack for my clients, and then I have my private one-on-one clients who usually communicate with me by WhatsApp. So that's already three channels that I'm monitoring during the day.

And then of course I'm creating content. So I have to think about what do I wanna say? What's important? What am I sharing? What masterclass am I sharing this month? And what is the information, the research that I need to do, the research that I need to share, right? You see how all of these are questions that are in my mind and then I need to send emails, what systems and processes, what day do I send the email, what day do I record my podcast? And of course, what's the topic that's going to be on my podcast this week?

If you have all of these details swimming around in your brain and you haven't created a system to automate some of your processes, for example, getting the information into the microphone for the podcast and then getting it uploaded so that it can be edited, transcribed, and sent out onto the interwebs. Like, that's a process that gets taken place so I don't have to sit and edit it every single week by myself. And then, of course, it has to be shared with my audience by email. How does that happen? Do I have a system and process in place?

And when I'm running a masterclass, how do I communicate? There's another system and process for sharing the registration for the masterclass, even thinking about the topics, and then sharing the recordings. Each one of these little steps in your business can be automated to a certain degree, probably to, if it's not 100%, 98% degree. There might be a little bit of manual intervention that you'll have to do, but I strongly encourage you to follow yourself, track yourself, shadow yourself, and do a time audit.

We've talked about time audits before, just noticing where your time goes, but now this kind of audit is different. You want to notice all of the tasks that you're doing. So number one, you can group like tasks, but also whatever you're doing manually, you can start thinking to yourself, how can I automate this process so that you can extricate yourself from pressing a lot of buttons, typing a lot on your keyboards, and things would just happen behind the scenes?

Now, some of it can be delegated out to an assistant, but I highly recommend that if there is a process that you repeat over and over and over again, you will want to automate the system.

So let's just talk about, I've already mentioned two of the three parts of this framework without actually telling you what the framework is. So number one is to automate, right? Every repeatable task that requires manual intervention or manual effort, it's literally stealing your time. So you wanna figure out what tools, scheduling, what can you do for client onboarding? If there is a Google form or an Airtable form that a client can fill out when they're onboarding, what sort of email followups can be automated? Whatever you can create, which is automated, and sometimes you can automate a system and still personalize it, you definitely want to do that.

So what I do, by the way, if anybody wants to schedule a meeting with me, I can send them a Calendly link rather than going back and forth by email or back and forth by WhatsApp. I can say here, schedule a time that works for you, and then I'm taken out of the picture. And then of course invoices for many of the payments, we have Stripe, so my clients can pay by Stripe, and the invoice gets issued automatically. Unfortunately, the automation to my Israeli bookkeeping system is not yet up and ready to go with Stripe, but I'm very hopeful that one day in the future it will work.

And then similarly, you can automate systems in your home. We, in our home, as I said, we still go to the grocery store, but we have an Excel sheet that has all of the main groceries that we buy on a week-to-week basis. So I don't have to think what I need to buy. I just look at it right in front of me and then I can go to my cupboard. I can check if I need to buy more oil. Do I need to buy more salt or eggs or vegetables? It's right there. That's kind of a way we systematized.

And then because we still, we like that, we like to go to the supermarket, our family's not that big anymore. So even when we have a lot of guests for Shabbat, we still can put it in like half a basket. So we do that, we go, and we get to choose our own fruits and vegetables. Maybe one day we will automate that even more. So that's number one is to automate.

Number two, which I spoke about briefly, handing things off to your assistant, delegate. Your time as the CEO of your business is highly valuable. Your mind, your clarity of thinking, your creativity, you being the visionary for your business, you want to protect your brain and keep a lot of unnecessary details out of your mind because it's fogging up your decisions. It's hard to be a visionary if you're trying to hold in your brain all the invoicing that you need to send to all of your clients.

So if you're doing everything yourself, once you have done an audit of all of your tasks during the course of your week, you can notice which ones you can delegate out to your assistant. Last week, I asked my assistant to really create the SOPs, the standard operating procedures for everything that she's doing. And I'm gonna be reviewing that next week so that I can go through and see what systems still need to be in place and what things can I add onto her list so that I can take them off of my plate?

So if you're still doing everything in your business, yourself, you are number one, you're not leveraging your time, you're not leveraging your thinking, you're not leveraging your brain capacity properly, and you really wanna bring an assistant into your business because your thinking skills are highly, highly valuable. And not that an assistant isn't valuable, they're so incredibly valuable, and they can take some repeatable tasks off of your plate so that you can be in your zone of genius.

So find yourself a virtual assistant. Maybe there's someone out there, if you do regular design or graphic design, you can bring someone into your business to do that. One of my clients and I, we were working today on a job description, literally a job description for her to bring somebody in to do some of the operations in her business. So you want to be creating a list of activities, tasks that you can outsource to somebody else.

And by the way, that includes your house. Your kids can fold laundry, your kids can wash dishes, your kids can go shopping, and they can make their own dentist appointments. But really, this isn't a parenting class either. But that was one thing that raising a large family that I have to pat myself on the back that I did extremely well, is I was a very impressive delegator to my kids.

So automate, delegate, and the third step of this three-part framework is eliminate. We've talked about this in my 4D formula. I call it delete. Here, we're just calling it eliminate. Get rid of things that aren't high value or get rid of things that are going to take a lot of time to implement and they're low value. So anything that's gonna take a very, very long time and it's gonna suck your time and your energy away from other high value tasks, you just can't do it. Delete, delete, delete, right? 

Most entrepreneurs actually find they don't have a time problem in their business. They're just spending their time on low value tasks and maybe tasks that feel productive, but it's not a top priority. Top priority is the task that's going to bring in clients, it's going to bring in money, it's going to keep cash flow flowing into your business. And the next priority is systematizing so that you don't have to do things over and over again that can be done by a machine or can be done by an assistant instead of you. 

So really go through, delete, eliminate, get rid of all of the things that are sucking your time away so that you can really keep your mind focused on the high value tasks, tactics, planning, and strategy that you need for your business. And again, this is gonna happen also for your house. 

And then what you need to do once you've gone through that task list, if you find that there is something that can be repeated over and over again, or will be repeated, for example, I run masterclasses on a regular basis. So I have a system for how I think about my topic, plan the topic, what day of the week, what time, am I going to schedule it on Zoom, Zoom webinars, Zoom meeting? Like I have a list of everything that I do for my masterclass. And that way I can follow it step by step by step. I don't need to think. I need to think about the, you know, the presentation. That's way more important than thinking about what do I do first and what do I do fourth? So create yourself SOPs, standard operating procedures, so that you don't have to remember what you do and somebody else who's stepping in instead of you, she also doesn't have to remember what she's supposed to do for you because it's all written out.

And I have to say, one thing that steals people's time, again, we're talking about priorities, is all of the notifications on your phone. If you are constantly picking up your phone, you're looking for social media, people talking to you, people pinging you, people wanting to get your attention, that will definitely slow you down.

If you are looking at your emails all day, somebody sent you an email, it's like, it's an easy task, reading an email, answering an email, but you have to put times into your day when you're answering emails, when you allow yourself, you're the CEO, you're the leader, when you're allowing yourself to be on social media because that's a task that needs to be done for your business, but it's not a task that you do to get some relaxation.

If you need to relax, if you need to free up your brain, get up, do a little dance, go and have a drink of water, go outside and have a breath of fresh air, but don't, for the love of goodness, don't use social media as a way to relax and decompress. There are much better ways, much healthier ways for you to do that.

So that's what is so important that we need to talk about is delegating, eliminating, automating, and I guess a sub-point of that is really making sure that you prioritize what you are doing in your business. What are the high-value tasks that you need to be doing as the leader of your business, what can you hand off to somebody else?

Because if you're not doing that, you're just gonna be the bottleneck in your business. We talked about that last week on the podcast, the three bottlenecks that are keeping you stuck at $100,000 more or less. You really, really need to figure out a different system and as much as you can, stop deciding, like thousands and thousands of micro decisions every day. There are systems in place so you don't have to think about it. Remember, I just talked about my process for creating a masterclass. I don't need to think about it.

It's written out there step by step by step. So I don't even have to have recall from my brain. Oh, last time I did like this. It doesn't really matter. Even that recall takes up your emotional energy, it takes up your capacity. And you want to put your capacity, which is that finite thing that's going to be, you know, you're going to be too exhausted to think that up by the end of the day. You want to be able to use your emotional and energetic and analytical capacity early in the day and not get stuffed up with a gazillion and a half decisions that you don't necessarily need to make. 

So let's just wrap up this podcast by reminding you that the most important thing that you can do, number one, is to do an audit of all your tasks and look at them. This is, you know, the reverse side of the coin, the other side of the coin from looking at where your time is going. But now I want you to notice the tasks. What are the most high-priority tasks that you as the CEO should be doing? It's always gonna be strategizing and creative and visionary and thinking about the future of your business and then it's gonna be making sure that you have quality people on your team who can do a lot of the work instead of you and quality systems in place. 

Because some of that stuff that you're doing today, it needs to be removed from your plate. So how are you gonna actually grow your business and scale fast, how you can actually speed up, you're going to speed up by slowing down. You're going to look, you're going to notice, you're going to automate, delegate, and eliminate. And once you do that, you are just going to be blown away by how much creative capacity you have created in your mind and that is truly what's gonna take you faster than you can even imagine to a seven-figure business. 

All right, my friends, thank you so much for tuning in to the podcast episode. I want to remind you that the masterclass from burnout to making bank is available by replay. Go to my website, DebbieSassen.com/makebank, and you're going to learn that three-step process in depth for you to actually stop getting so stretched thin so you can actually have a bigger impact and make a lot more money in your business. All right, friends, I will see you next week on The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. Bye-bye for now.

Thanks for listening to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. If you want to stop underselling and underearning and close more sales, you need to clear the limiting money beliefs that are sabotaging your business growth. 

Head on over to DebbieSassen.com/mindset and download my free Money Mindset Workbook. Uncover and dissolve money blocks, like hundreds of other entrepreneurs who are now building six-, multi-six-, and seven-figure businesses and creating true financial freedom.