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Now, there are two conditions in this experiment. In one case, the students are told, “But you know, if you want to change your mind, I’ll always have the other one here, and in the next four days, before I actually mail it to headquarters, I’ll be glad to swap it out with you . . . Better yet, I’ll check with you. You ever want to change your mind, it’s totally returnable.” The other half of the students are told the exact opposite. “Make your choice. And by the way, the mail is going out, gosh, in two minutes, to England. Your picture will be winging its way over the Atlantic. You will never see it again.” Now, half of the students . . . are asked to make predictions about how much they’re going to come to like the picture they keep and the picture they leave behind. Other students are just sent back to their little dorm rooms and they are measured . . . on their liking and satisfaction with the picture. And look at what we find.

First of all . . . [the students] think they’re going to maybe come to like the picture they chose a little more than the one they left behind, but these are not statistically significant differences. It’s a very small increase, and it doesn’t much matter whether they were in the reversible or irreversible condition.

Wrong-o. Bad simulators. Because here’s what’s really happening. Both right before the swap and five days later, people who are stuck with that picture, who have no choice, who can never change their mind, like it a lot. And people who are deliberating—“Should I return it? Have I gotten the right one? Maybe this isn’t the good one? Maybe I left the good one?”—have killed themselves. They don’t like their picture, and in fact even after the opportunity to swap has expired, they still don’t like their picture. Why? Because the (reversible) condition is not conducive to the synthesis of happiness.

So here’s the final piece of this experiment. We bring in a whole new group of naive Harvard students and we say, “You know, we’re doing a photography course, and we can do it one of two ways. We could do it so that when you take the two pictures, you’d have four days to change your mind, or we’re doing another course where you take the two pictures and you make up your mind right away and you can never change it. Which course would you like to be in?” Duh! Sixty-six percent of the students—two-thirds—prefer to be in the course where they have the opportunity to change their mind. Hello? Sixty-six percent of the students choose to be in the course in which they will ultimately be deeply dissatisfied with the picture.

No wonder we are exhausted from making decisions. Because we want to make those decisions. We want to go to the movie theater with the most movies playing, we like the restaurant with the long menu, we want the shoe store with the most shoes. But having more choice reduces our happiness. We get decision fatigue. What happens? We avoid the decision or we make a bad decision. And we always worry we made the wrong choice. This is why I always failed to invest any money. It’s why, looking back at our wedding registry, Leslie and I wondered who picked some of the things on there. We had to go through it all again with fresh sponges.

“Freedom and autonomy are critical to our well-being, and choice is critical to freedom and autonomy,” says Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice. “Nonetheless, though modern Americans have more choice than any group of people ever has before, and thus, presumably, more freedom and autonomy, we don’t seem to be benefiting from it psychologically.”

4 simple words that will help you prioritize everything

You make fewer decisions. You do some ten times faster, some five times faster, and some many times longer. But it all adds up to quicker decisions and focusing on what’s important. You look at decisions you make on a daily basis and decide which ones to automate, regulate, effectuate, and debate.

Ruby WatchCo. is one of the most popular restaurants in Toronto—ranked in the top ten of thousands in the city—and run by celebrity chef Lynn Crawford. Before opening the restaurant, Lynn worked as executive chef at the Manhattan Four Seasons, starred in Restaurant Makeover, and wrote two bestselling cookbooks.

Her restaurant operates like no other in the city!

Reservations are taken at only two seating times, it’s a flat fifty bucks per person, and the four-course prix fixe menu changes every day. What else is available besides the four-course prix fixe menu? Nothing! There are no other choices. Nothing else to eat, no menus to choose from, no prices to think about. And everybody gets dessert. For the kitchen, there are only allergies to accommodate—cooking is streamlined, dishes all the same size, waste is limited, and checks added quickly for faster turnaround.

Everything arrives “family-style” in big dishes at the center of the table, and the dimly lit chattery dining room is packed every night of the week. The Globe and Mail says, “It’s nice for the chef, who gets to be spontaneous. Also very nice for the chef to give up that whole challenge of offering different menu items, as the cost and stress of both stocking and cooking different foods is eliminated. It’s so much easier!”

Lynn says, “The decision of what to choose at a restaurant can be overwhelming. I’m thrilled when someone says, ‘Let me cook for you.’”

Delaying is gone. Choosing nothing is gone! And businesses like Lynn’s restaurant can benefit.

Guess what Stanford researcher Sheena Iyengar reports Procter & Gamble found when they chopped the varieties of Head & Shoulders on the shelf from twenty-six to fifteen? When you remove half the number of bottles the customers sees, your sales must go down, right? Nope, they got a sales increase of 10%.

When we are presented with too many decisions, we either:

Do nothing. Our brains are exhausted, so we stop making decisions completely. We walk out in protest! This is what happens on forms where you need to pick one of twenty-five different investment funds for your pension or twenty-six varieties of shampoo. What do people do? Ignore them all. Go with the default. We are so tired by this point we quit completely.

Do poorly. Don’t feel like quitting? Well, there is another option. Making a decision that stinks. Being so exhausted you pick something, anything, just to get the decision-making done. Adding a $300 ice bucket to your wedding registry. Grabbing a king-size Oh Henry! at the end of your grocery shop. Easiest over best.

Your brain is the world’s most valuable piece of real estate. It produces world-changing ideas, creates beautiful art, and explores great mysteries of life. But trivial decisions and endless choices buzz in front of your brain all day. They’re flashing lights. Preventing you from pushing deeper. How can—ding!—think about—ping!—when all you’re—ring! Endless decisions steal your deep thoughts.

Tiny decisions squat on your primo lot rent-free. They don’t pay. They don’t apologize. They just steal your brainpower. Sure, a lot of this comes from our increasingly connected world. Nicholas Carr, author of New York Times bestseller The Shallows, says, “The Net’s interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.”

I made 285 decisions on an average day. My brain was contemplating, weighing, evaluating, and deciding every minute I was awake.