Overcoming Decision Fatigue: Context and Practice

Note-Processing, Lesson 4: Exercises and a Melodramatic Warning About the Coming Apocalypso

Why I am Such a Failure

My biggest failure as a writer is that I don’t write enough. There are a few reasons for that, all of which are fully justified and have saved the world from a lot of wasted energy and thus a premature death from entropy.

It’s not that I haven’t written anything. I have written or co-authored three books, one of which made it to a third edition (and nearly killed me in the act). However, I am 61 and have written constantly since before I was conscious of the fact that one can decide to write or not to write, so that’s not really much writing.

So the second reason I don’t write enough is because I write too much. I’m curious about everything and I want to respond to everybody. Before the internet, I used to write up to five or six letters a day, by hand, to friends. I courted my wife (this was in Jane Austen’s time) through letters. I’ve drafted a multitude of essays and stories. I’ve written articles, some of which have been published in journals or magazines.

But because of my wide range of interests and my fondness for people, I’ve never developed the routines and disciplines to be “a writer.”

The fourth reason I don’t write enough is because every time I sit down to do it, I have to deal with a computer screen. Behind that screen is a sophisticated code that creates the illusion of a mind - indeed, a world-mind - a code used to give the appearance of communication, relationships, and practical utility.

However, since my mind was pretty active before it encountered this inhumane device, the device caused a revulsion in my mind, the guttural impact of which I have made no attempt to hide or recover from.

More simply: my mind moves around and interacts with this marvelous and wonderful, inconvenient and painful thing called the world, or reality, or the cosmos. But the thing that appears on the screen creates and then forces its users to move around and interact with a model of the world, reality, or the cosmos that refuses to acknowledge that it is only necessarily a very tiny portion of that reality and that tiny portion is compressed, through the minds of a very few people from within an extraordinarily limited context using a cripplingly limited tool, into a model that the whole world is supposed to bow to.

I refuse. Always have. But I do have to use it.

Let me put it this way: you should not reduce your mind and its activities to what you can encounter on the screen. You are so much more than that. The pain you experience in the real world is by its nature a feedback response from reality. The pain you experience from the screen world is the pain of your soul being torn out of its home.

If you don’t feel that pain, you should try to experience it. You can bring it about by going for a walk in the woods in the rain with a chicken pecking at your chest or, if that sounds like an extreme first step, by having a serious argument about something that matters more than life itself with somebody you love more than life itself.

If you don’t value anything or anybody more than life, start by writing in a notebook instead of a digital tool. You’ll be surprised how much it hurts and how much the pain is worth it.

The first reason I don’t write enough is because I’m the CEO of a not for profit, which I started so I could research, teach, and write, but which has demanded so much of my attention that I feel like I’m stealing time when I write.

The third reason is because I have a hard time keeping things in order.

Transition to this Post

In this lesson, and each of these lessons, I offer you psycho-practical tools: tools that you can use to research, take and process notes, and end up with a written product.

I do so for two reasons: first, because they work and second, because they help overcome the very common psychological challenges writers and note-processors encounter.

Here I shall insert the obligatory apology for taking so long to write this post, which I hope I have explained discretely above. Going forward, I shall attempt to write regularly but will need to write shorter posts most of the time to keep my commitment.

By now I trust you have had the time you needed to create your three notebooks, practice creating notes, and exercise the cross-referencing and linking functions of your glorious mind.

Decision-Fatigue

In a previous post I mentioned one of the biggest barriers we run into as note-processors: decision-fatigue. In this post, we revisit this form of fatigue because it is an ongoing problem. The more I think and watch, the more convinced I am that by it more people are dissuaded from becoming good writers than almost anything else.

When decision-fatigue is permitted to grow it undermines everything we do, draining our energy like weeds in a garden.

Doing the Impossible

I’ve even begun to suspect that digital technology is psychologically debilitating for many people because it simultaneously does two incompatible things: it creates an unnatural framework and then compels us to amke immediate decisions within it.

Rather than walk with us us through our normal decision-making patterns, it demands an uncountable number of decisions from us every second we spend interacting with it. Promising to make us more efficient, it mitigates against the two things we most need to act efficiently: good decisions when we need to make them and no decisions when they should already have been made (oh, and also tools that don’t disrupt the flow of our labors).

Humans are analogs, not digits. We live in an analog cosmos. The digital realm is only a very tiny, detached portion of that cosmos, and it’s only a part of it at all because we put it there.

When we are forced to act like digits, we become anxious and unhappy (which is why we are obsessed with technologies that free us from the technologies we have adopted). That is one reason notebooks make us happy.

Our technologies force us to make endless decisions at a micro-level that exhaust us, partly because we are not even aware we are making them. Meanwhile, constant little distractions pop up like mosquitos in the outfield on a hot summer day: message notifications, digital sounds, and visual signals that tell you you misspelled a word, used bad grammar, or otherwise made some micro-mistake that has only a distant and accidental relation to that moment’s thinking.

The trouble is, these tiny little drops of acid burn the mind’s eye. If you were writing by hand you probably wouldn’t make the micro-mistake or if you did you wouldn’t need to notice it then and there. The false and petty urgency of digital tools is a thousand paper-cuts to the human, analog mind.

As a result, many thoughtful people feel trapped by the tools that promised to set us free. I am writing in Substack to save you from the digital entrapment you hoped would be less violent here, to free you from the decision-fatigue that every writer has to contend with but that, in the digital realm becomes an inescapable dissonant permeating vibration.

The Common Solution

I’ve said that decision fatigue is a major problem. The reason is quite simple. When we don’t have to make decisions our minds are at rest so we can do what we are doing without noticing it. We want that rest. The trouble is, life doesn’t permit it. It gives us new problems every day and most hours and minutes.

We deal with those problems by coming up with solutions that can be applied repeatedly without analysis. Every evening we brush our teeth. Every morning we stain them with coffee. Every night we tell our loved ones that we love them. Before we put the patty on the grill we turn it on.

We only have to think about these things if something goes wrong. If we had to decide every evening, every morning, and every night whether to do those things, we’d go mad — except that we’d be too tired, so we’d just lie down and die.

The Writer’s Solution

Writers need the same sorts of habits and rituals. If you don’t know where to put a note, where to find ideas, how to order a series of thoughts, which scheme works best for a given purpose, and a thousand other details, you’d go mad. Except it makes us so tired we just let the pen lie down and the artifact is stillborn.

You’ll always have hard decisions to make when you write. The decisions you can make ahead of time need to be made ahead of time.

As an aside, I think this is one of the cruelest mistakes we make when we teach children to write. We tell them to write whatever comes to their minds before we have taught them how to explore their minds or explained to them how things get in there or how to get things out.

Three Things to Do

To reduce decision-fatigue, the first thing you should do is use a notebook or index cards for your note-taking and avoid digital tools. They have a place, but it comes later.

The second thing to do is complete the things we discussed in earlier lessons: set up your notebooks, use the listed sources to generate notes, know how you will write them, reference them, and retrieve them.

Then, practice. Do it badly. Make adjustments. Assess your work based on your goals and made decisions. Are the notes easy to find? Were you able to write promptly before the note slipped away? Do you make use of various sources and are they properly referenced? Can you see how your notes relate to each other.

In the previous lesson you only wrote a few notes.

Homework: How to Practice

For your homework to prepare for the next lesson, write more notes, in each notebook if possible, so you can practice linking notes with each other. For each new note:

• Be aware of how accessible your notebook was when you needed it and how easy it was to find the right destination for your note (ie the page in the notebook)

• Note the source from which the note arose (visual, audio, mento)

• Give the note a title and add it to the TOC

• Add key words to the bottom of the page and add then move those words and the page numbers to your index

• Link some of the pages to each other (don’t force this one; if nothing links yet don’t worry; they will).

• Above all (since this is a practice exercise), notice where things break down. You are learning a skill, so you should expect it to resist you while you practice. Any time you get stuck, have to make a decision and aren’t sure about the answer, or feel anxious, make a note. Perhaps have a page for that purpose, called something like, “crisis moments” or “hang-ups” or “despair and destruction” or something equally melodramatic.

Your goal: make these steps habits so you don’t get distracted by them when you are trying to record real thoughts

Ideally, you’d have a coach who could discuss those crises with you, but in the meantime, just writing them out will at least help. I would like to think I can be some service in the comments, but, as the long wait for this post demonstrated, I can regrettably make no guarantees at this time.

A brief Summary and Transition to the Next Lesson

1. The assigned exercise requires that you write more notes and then gives you something specific to do with them: evaluate them.

2. Until you stop using digital technology, I will continue to use it to try to convince you not to use it - or at least to reduce your use of it to its genuinely useful applications (which are fewer than we believe and, I believe, not worth the usually hidden price).

In the next lesson, I’m going to address the issue of confusion, which is another cause of decision fatigue. I’m not going to address confusion in the abstract, but in a particular way we are taught to confuse ourselves when we write.

Meanwhile, work on those notes and note where they stress you. I sincerely hope my next post will be uploaded within a couple weeks. And I hope these notes will enable you to write when you should write and note when you should note.