Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?

BLUF: Decision fatigue is when your willpower suffers following a period of strenuous or continuous decision making. You are more prone to make impulsive choices or over-simplified choices. You are prone to lose your temper. You are also likely to just put off important decisions for later. Interestingly, you are also more likely to give up on tasks that require mental concentration or physical willpower (such as holding an ice cube for as long as you can).

Are you self-aware enough to recognize when you are lapsing into decision fatigue?

Do you see evidence of decision fatigue among colleagues within your workplace--not just with attitudes, but the actual decisions made? Could this be a contributor to the recent branding of toxic leadership? (Some of the leaders where just obliviously exhausted.)

Do you think that the military is setting service members up to suffer from increased decision fatigue or could it improve with the current climate?

What can be done, if anything can be done? I would love to hear thoughts and perspectives on this.

My thoughts: With scaled down forces, leaders have a greater number of tasks, fewer subordinates to delegate to, and less time to conduct individual training. The solution is to dump training online to streamline information output. The detriment is that subordinates are not getting the human conversation necessary to improve their decision-making processes. Most of the time, service members fast click through training and finish one hour of training in 10 minutes, thus sacrificing opportunities to make decisions. Otherwise, it would take a week or more to complete all the annual online training. Even when a service member takes time to answer questions, the answers and feedback are fairly rigid and are meant to simply push for the correct answer. As well, with fewer F2F training sessions, service members need to spend their own time Googling for answers and solutions, which piles on to the decisions they already need to make. Lastly, at least in the Army, leaders frequently brag that they get all their work done by working extra hours and completing everything on four hours of sleep at night. In short, decision fatigue and sleep deprivation are feeding into each other. (I think that I will save my thoughts on sleep deprivation for a later post.) This is just one of my observations, and I could easily be off base.