Newsletter - Better Decisions, Willpower, and Making Work Work

Steps That Cut Down On Decision Fatigue

We are back in the saddle for another week of future work skills. As ever, it's in the form of a tip, an insight, and our favourite new thing. Thanks for all your recent feedback, which we hope is resulting in making this better and more targeted every week!

This week - how to reduce decision fatigue, what the latest science tells us about willpower and an update on our podcast.

Let's go!

The Tip - Making Better Decisions

Video Length: 89 Seconds

During Barack Obama's presidency, Vanity Fair interviewed him. In that interview, he shared that in general he only wore grey suits and blue suits. As he put it - "I'm trying to pare down decisions. I don't want to make decisions about what I'm eating or wearing because I have too many other decisions to make."

Regardless of your opinion on the 44th President overall, it's worth noting what he is talking about here - Decision Fatigue. Life involves so many decisions these days that it likely affects all of us in some way or another. In this week's video, we take a closer look at decision fatigue and recommend some strategies to help YOU make better decisions.

Make a good decision right now and watch the video below!

The Insight: About Willpower

Do you know what willpower is? At a high level, of course we all know what it is, but what do you think it is as a psychological phenomenon? It might surprise you to learn that there is not a scientific consensus on the answer.

Historically, scientists believed that willpower was a character trait - i.e. certain people have more of it and others have less of it. By the 1990s, something called the "strength model" of self-control emerged. This model was popularized by the Ego Depletion Theory, which proposed that willpower was a limited resource (just like the decision-making we discuss above) - the more we used willpower, the less we had of it.

But psychologists have struggled to reproduce this finding, and it increasingly appears that willpower is NOT a limited resource, but rather something that fluctuates according to a variety of factors, including how tired we are, how much attention we are paying and our surroundings.

It's fun to know the science of this, but what does it mean in terms of how we live our day-to-day lives, and how we fulfill our goals? The research shows three things clearly....

1) Trying to consciously summon up the willpower to achieve a medium-term goal will rarely (if ever) work. Instead, it makes more sense to focus on creating the conditions that will help you have more willpower more often. That means making sure you are well-rested, moving often, and taking care of your nutrition.

2) Strongly consider your environment. You will have far more success changing your surrounding environment to support your desired behavior than relying on willpower. For example, if you want to lose weight - by far the most successful long-term approach is to make it harder to get high-calorie, low-nutritional-value foods, for example by removing them from the house. Your willpower WILL fluctuate, so protect yourself when it does.

3) Calling out others (often in the name of supporting them) for lapses in willpower is completely and entirely counter-productive. When people do this, it is often with the best of intentions, but the effect is almost always a negative cycle that makes it harder for the other party to continue working on their goal.

So if you believe you struggle with willpower, don't beat yourself up over it, and start focusing on the things that will help you - improving your overall well-being and tweaking your environment. And if you are helping others, think about how to provide support and accountability in a way that will help those others achieve their goals most effectively.

Our Favourite New Thing

Our podcast has taken a little hiatus recently as we record new episodes, but you MIGHT have noticed, it's had another name change. Last season we were called Making Remote Work, but many of you were pretty vocal that this was out of step with everything else we are doing. We are, after all, a company focusing on upskilling humanity for the future of work. In other words, we don't just want to make REMOTE work, we want to make WORK work, whether it's remote, hybrid or anything else.

So, our favourite new thing this week is a name. The podcast is now simply called "Making Work Work", and you can find us on any podcast platform. Simply search for that title or for BillionMinds and you will find us. There are 45 existing episodes you can binge, or you can simply wait two weeks, when we will launch the first episode of the new series under the new title!

About BillionMinds

BillionMinds brings you this newsletter each and every week. But that’s not all we do. We also help employees and managers in companies around the world embed key soft skills to thrive in the modern workplace and get certified in those skills. Each of our Learn/Do experiences is less than 10 minutes a day and you can see meaningful change within two weeks.

We work with both companies and individual employees. Certification programs start at $200 and we provide discounts for those seeking work, alongside the option for current users to nominate low/no-income people to access the program for FREE. For more information, visit us here.