Episode 013 | Zuck Your Life: Decision Fatigue & Self-Care

The IDEA concept discussed in Episode 009 helps us figure out which tasks, responsibilities, hobbies, and commitments we can Ignore (for now), Delegate, Eliminate, and Automate. Arguably our biggest responsibility, however, is to our own health. (Tough to do much of anything if you’re not here on the planet to do it.) Here, the tools in the IDEA kit are not all equally useful.



It’s not a great idea, for instance, to ignore your self-care. And you can’t really delegate it or eliminate it. But you can automate some of the activities around your self-care. And for some of us, finding a way to minimize our day-to-day decisions by automating some of them leads us to make better decisions about our health and leaves us more gas in the decision-making tank for other pursuits.



I got to thinking about this after going down a reading rabbit hole where I learned a bit about the habits of billionaires. Not really a thing I’m usually overly interested in, but in the end, I was grateful for the perspective I gained on a couple of things.



I am using “Zuck” as my catchphrase as a way to represent the tips I picked up from Mark Zuckerberg and the other billionaires that I read about. (I do this mostly because it’s more fun to say “Zuck your Meals” than say “Musk You Eat That” or something.)



Some ideas for you to mull over:



* Zuck Your Meals – Think about automating some of your meals to reduce the amount of energy you expend around deciding what to eat, what ingredients you need for it, etc. Bonus points if you decide upfront to choose meals that reflect your nutrition goals. For example, if you’re looking to get more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains in your life, can you decide to eat oatmeal and fruit at breakfast and salads for lunch everyday? I personally like to leave one-third of my meals (usually dinner) as the “wild card.” But, honestly, when we really get in the weeds with sports around here, even that can be a chore. During those times, I like to have a standard weekly dinner menu we can more or less count on so that I don’t have to expend the energy figuring out how to fuel us between sporting events. You know: Meatless Mondays (pasta, usually), Taco Tuesdays, Panini Wednesdays (Hey, we can’t always have alliteration on our side!). Anyway, you get the idea.* Zuck Your Shopping – If you’ve already zucked your meals, this part is automatically easier. How can you make it even easier? How about using the new pickup features at places like Target or Kroger? Perhaps an Amazon subscription that just shows up more or less when you need it without much additional input from you? What about trying out one of the food/meal delivery services, like Blue Apron, HelloFresh, or one of the 92 other ones that popped up during the time you were reading this post?* Zuck Your Clothes – I like to think of this one as Project Fonzie. I’m dating myself, but if you were a Happy Days fan, you knew what Fonzie was going to look like every week: jeans, white t-shirt, leather jacket. He was rocking the capsule wardrobe/minimalism thing before it was a thing. Maybe as with the zuck your meals example, you shoot for two-thirds of your wardrobe being capsule items that work perfectly for the majority of your day-to-day experiences. Have some fun with that last third. Whether or not you’re ready to embrace the minimalism/capsule approach, subscribing to one of the personal shopping subscription services like Stitch Fix or Trunk Club (or again, one of the dozens that launched in the last ten minutes) c...