It took me years to discover one of the main killers of my productivity: decision fatigue.

2025-12-01

It took me years to discover one of the main killers of my productivity: decision fatigue. Every day, I was making hundreds of small choices. What to answer first. Where to focus next. Whether to take one more call. When to stop working and be fully present with my family. Individually, they felt harmless. Together, they were brutal. By the afternoon, my brain would default to the path of least resistance: Easy tasks instead of meaningful work. Reacting to notifications instead of thinking strategically. Saying yes to things I should have declined. Not because I was lazy, but because my mental bandwidth was already spent. What changed things for me was realizing that high performers are not “better at deciding.” They are better at protecting their decisions. Here is what has helped me so far:

  1. Standardize the boring stuff. Morning routines, when I work out, when I do deep work, how I handle email. The more I turn into default patterns, the more energy I have for real problems.
  2. Automate with real leverage. Yes, I use autopay, recurring tasks, and templates. But the real shift came when I started creating AI agents that are more than tools. They are like coworkers: they draft, summarize, analyze, and support decisions so I can focus on growing the company instead of babysitting processes.
  3. Delegate intentionally. If someone else can do it competently, it does not belong on my plate. My job is not to be the hero. My job is to protect my attention for the work that truly moves the needle. I am not done. This is still very much a work in progress. I am going little by little, refining routines, improving agents, and feeding what I learn back into Lupo so we can create better learning experiences that help companies grow revenue or decrease their costs. The edge is not “hustling harder.” It is conserving the mental energy required for the few decisions that actually matter. How are you reducing decision fatigue in your own day, or using AI as a coworker instead of just another tool? Yeap… the image is my way of saying “I am moving faster now!” hashtag # productivity hashtag # decisionfatigue hashtag # leadership hashtag # startups hashtag # focus hashtag # ai hashtag # lupo