Latest / New Manager Conversations with Fexingo: First 90 Days, Managing Former Peers, and Leadership Basics / How New Managers Can Handle Decision Fatigue
Transcript
- Lucas: You know that feeling at the end of a day where you've answered a million questions, solved a dozen small problems, and you feel like your brain is just... static? Luna: Oh, absolutely. And then someone asks you what you want for dinner and you literally cannot decide. Lucas: Exactly. That's decision fatigue. And for new managers, it hits harder than almost anyone else, because the volume of choices you're making jumps overnight. As an individual contributor, you might have made five to ten meaningful decisions in a day. As a manager? A 2024 study from Cornell tracked managers in tech and found the average was 35 job-related decisions per day. Luna: Thirty-five. And I'm guessing not all of those are strategic. Lucas: Right, most are small — should I approve this time-off request, should I let this person take the afternoon for a dentist appointment, which project do we prioritize this sprint. The problem is each one draws from the same limited pool of mental energy. The Cornell researchers found that after the 20th decision, the quality of choices measurably declines. People start defaulting to the easiest option, or they procrastinate. Luna: So the real cost isn't just feeling tired — it's making worse decisions later in the day. Lucas: Bingo. And for a new manager who's still building trust with their team, a bad decision at 4 PM — like giving unclear feedback or approving a scope change without thinking it through — can ripple for weeks. So the question is: how do you protect your best mental energy for the decisions that actually matter? Luna: I've heard people talk about the 'decide once' principle — like Obama only wearing gray or blue suits, or Zuckerberg with the gray t-shirt. Lucas: That's exactly the framework. The idea is that for any decision you make repeatedly, you create a rule so you only decide once. Obama famously said, 'I don't want to make decisions about what I'm eating or wearing, because I have too many other decisions to make.' Now, for a new manager, you're not going to standardize your wardrobe, but you can standardize your decision process. Luna: Give me a concrete example. What does that look like in practice? Lucas: Sure. Let's say you're a marketing manager at a midsize B2B SaaS company in Austin. You have a team of five, and you're getting pings all day — can I expense this conference, should we use LinkedIn or Google Ads for this campaign, can I shift my hours to start later. Each one takes a minute of mental load. So you create a pre-commitment framework. For expenses, you set a clear policy: anything under $200 is auto-approved if it's in the budget line. No discussion. For channel decisions, you decide every quarter which two channels are primary, and you don't revisit until the next quarter. Luna: So you're eliminating the need to deliberate on repeat questions. Lucas: Exactly. One manager I spoke with — she runs a customer success team at a fintech company — she told me she reduced her daily decision count by 40 percent just by creating a decision tree for the most common five questions she got. She literally printed it out and put it on the wall. Now her team knows: if the issue is X, do Y. She only gets involved for exceptions. Luna: I love that. But I can imagine some pushback — not every decision can be routinized. What about the genuinely novel ones? Lucas: Great point. You can't pre-commit for everything. So you need a filter for triaging. I like a two-question test. First: does this decision have a significant impact on the team's goals or the company's outcomes? Second: is it reversible? If the answer to impact is low, and the answer to reversible is yes — delegate it, or set a rule and move on. If impact is high and reversible, you can make it quickly and correct later. It's only the high-impact, hard to reverse decisions that need your full cognitive energy. Luna: So you're basically creating a decision hierarchy. Low-impact reversible goes to the bottom of your list. Lucas: Exactly. And you schedule those high-stakes decisions for the time of day when your mental energy is highest. For most people, that's morning. So you protect that window — no email, no Slack, no small decisions. You block 90 minutes for the two or three decisions that will actually move the needle. Luna: That's the time-management version of the suit thing. Protect the high-value stuff. Lucas: Right. And here's the thing — if you're a new manager and you're feeling constantly drained, it's not because you're not working hard enough. It's probably because you're making too many small decisions. The fix isn't to work more hours. It's to design your environment so you decide less. Luna: That's a really helpful reframe. I think a lot of new managers feel guilty for being tired, like they should be able to handle it all. Lucas: Yeah, and that guilt just adds another layer of cognitive load. So instead, treat decision fatigue as a systems problem. What rules can you set? What can you delegate? What time of day are you reserving for the big stuff? Luna: And if listeners are thinking 'this sounds great but where do I start' — a simple first step is to track your decisions for three days. Just write down every choice you make, no matter how small. You'll probably be shocked at the volume, and it'll be obvious where to start standardizing. Lucas: That's a perfect experiment. And if today's episode actually helped you think about your own decision load, here's something — the way this show stays ad-free is listener support. You can buy me a coffee at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a small way to keep these conversations going without any sponsor interruptions. Luna: Yeah, it really makes a difference. We love putting this together, and knowing it's useful to you is the best part. Lucas: Alright, back to it. One more tip I want to leave you with: at the end of each day, decide tonight what the one most important decision is for tomorrow. Write it down. That way, when you walk in, you don't waste any mental energy figuring out what to focus on. You already decided. Luna: That's a great bookend to today's topic. Decide tonight, so tomorrow you can execute. Lucas: Exactly. Thanks for being here, and we'll see you next time on New Manager Conversations.