Predeciding...Your New Best Friend

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We’ve spent three weeks exploring decision-making:

Week 1: Decision fatigue comes from volume, methodology, and the cascade.

Week 2: Decisions aren’t endpoints—they’re doorways.

Week 3: When you can’t see the whole path, do the next right thing.

This week, we’re introducing a practice to remove some decisions from your day. It’s called predeciding.

Deciding now what you’ll do later.

It’s making a choice once so you don’t have to remake it every single day.

Monday is laundry day. End of discussion.

Wear the same outfit on Wednesdays. Done.

Get gas on the way to your Thursday meeting. Check.

These are bandwidth savers.

Remember the 35,000 decisions we make? Predeciding protects your bandwidth by removing small, recurring decisions from your daily load. You’re leaning into timing. Instead of deciding what’s for dinner at 5pm, when you’re tired and hangry, you decided last week. Or years ago when you started a tradition.

When my daughters were little, on the first of each month, we had chicken soup and grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner. March 1, April 1, May 1. One decision. Twelve meals planned for the year.

It started because I wanted to help one of my daughters practice her reading. We had the book Chicken Soup with Rice by Maurice Sendak. It’s a book that contains a poem about chicken soup with rice for each month of the year. I thought if we made it a monthly ritual, she could read the poem, practice her reading, and see her progress over time.

She suggested we also have chicken soup with rice, which morphed into chicken noodle soup because it was easier to find. The book got put away after each reading so it would be fresh the next month. The soup was Lipton from a package (listen, I got my nutritional A+ on other days.) The sandwiches evolved from basic grilled cheese to pimento cheese with tomato slices as we got fancier.

One day a month I didn’t have to think about dinner. It was a meal I could make any time, any day and eventually the girls could too. It didn’t matter if there were extra visitors at our table.

That decision made the first day of every month a little easier. I loved the first of the month.

Predeciding creates space, not restriction.

That monthly meal didn’t feel like a rule, it felt like relief. One less decision in a season when I was drowning in them.

Want to test out predeciding?

Here are some daily possibilities:

• Weekday breakfasts are the same two options

• Fill your water bottle first thing every morning (insert water link here)

• Walk the dog at the same time each evening

• No email before 9 a.m.

• Maybe weekly options would help more:

• Monday is laundry day

• Wednesday is leftovers day

• Thursday is grocery shopping day

• Friday is for leggings and a cute shirt.

Predeciding makes the biggest impact with decisions that repeat…meals, routines, errands. Once you start looking, you’ll notice so many possibilities. Choose one and resist the urge to predecide everything at once. You’re not committing to do this forever, you’re experimenting with what could reduce your decision load.

“But what if I don’t want soup on the first?”

Don’t have soup. It’s about having a default so your brain doesn’t have to work so hard when you’re already tired or have a full day ahead of you. No need to be rigid here. Sometimes, life happened and we didn’t have soup on the first. We had it on the second. Or the fifth. The decision and the tradition didn’t fail if we missed a month. We simply came back to it. It’s a choice we trusted, not a rule to follow.

As we move into May, I want to invite you to experiment with predeciding.

Pick one small, recurring decision that uses up your bandwidth.

Decide it now.

Try it for a month.

Include a thought...pick your own or borrow this one: I make good decisions. 

Notice what happens.

Does it create space? Relief? Energy for the decisions that actually need your attention?

Predeciding won’t eliminate decision fatigue, but it does reduce the number of decisions, which gives you a little more bandwidth when you need to choose well.

Hit reply and tell me what you picked.

I’ll be cheering you on, dipping my sandwich in my soup,

 

Going Deeper:
If you want to explore more about thoughtful decision-making, Emily P. Freeman’s ✨The Next Right Thing and Craig Groeschel’s ✨Think Ahead are both excellent companions.

You’ll find a full month Decision Journal Prompts on this board on my Pinterest account.

I created a workbook for you. It’s located in the Tools & Treasures section on my website. Email me if you have any questions→paigekullmancoaching@gmail.com