# Ego Depletion The fact that making decisions “takes energy”. If a person is making a lot of hard decisions from morning until night they are more likely to splurge and eat an entire cake at the end of the day. Dan Ariely invoked this when explaining why it seems that poor people tend to make financial decisions that don’t make sense. If a person is adequately poor, energy has to be put into the decision-making process even for small decisions like whether or not to buy coffee in the morning. After an entire day of making such decisions there is the decision making ability of the average person has taken a considerable toll. Leaving them more prone to making reckless decisions. This is the reason why Barrack Obama has two different styles of suit and many identical pieces of each: less decisions to make. Having well established routines or habits is also useful here. Doing so is to have done the work of having to make a decision in advance. If you eat the same thing for breakfast every day, you won’t get stuck trying to figure out what to have for breakfast. If you exercise at the same time every day you won’t have to think about when you will get around to it. ## Open questions - Why is it that decision-making uses up energy like this? - If our “ego” depletes like a muscle, is there a way to make that muscle stronger permanently? Is there a way to train it? - How and why does *sleep* recover our depleted “ego”? - Why is it that when we wake up our decision making ability is restored? - Would people that get better sleep tend to make measurably better decisions? - Can the average person improve the quality of their moment-to-moment decision-making by improving the quality of our sleep? - What else might restore our depleted egos? Eating? Resting? Taking a break? Meditating? Actually making the bad decisions? - Should this influence how we design forms and applications? - Is adding a lot of options increasing the difficulty rather than maximising the freedom? Is making decisions for people in advance helping them, is it doing work for them? - Consider how long it takes to order a subway sub vs a burger from McDonald’s - Consider how nice it is to go to a cafe and say “the usual” - the work of making the decision has been done once and for all and need not be repeated - I really like the compromise of having everything configurable *but* having a set of really sane defaults %% # Note-Making Principles: ## One Idea per Note - What is the idea? ## Written in Clear Language as if to a General Audience - Will future you understand this? ## Your Own Understanding - Write your own views in your own words ## An Explanation, Not a Description - It should answer the question “why” not just “what” ## How Does it Link to Your Existing Problems and Ideas? - What problems does it solve in your mind? - Why exactly are you interested in writing about this? ## What Further Questions Does This Note Spark? ## When Will I Ever Need This Knowledge in the Future? - In what context will I want to be able to access this information - (use this to determine keywords that make sense.) %%