How Teachers and Trainers Can Avoid Decision Fatigue

The Teaching Space - A podcast by Martine Ellis

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Categories:

Education

Highlights

Introduction

  • Making decisions uses considerable mental energy which is limited (00:42 ).
  • Decision fatigue is real (00:52).
  • Educators make a lot of decisions - some significant - so it is definitely worth looking at ways to minimise the number of small decisions we make daily, to reserve energy for the big ones (01:42).

Small Decisions

  • Time for a brain dump (01:58).
  • List the small decisions you have to make every day. Examples (02:19):
    • What to eat for lunch/dinner.
    • When to each lunch/dinner.
    • What time to wake up and go to bed.
    • What to do at the gym.
    • What to wear to go to the gym.
    • What to wear to work.

What Can You Automate, Delegate or Eliminate?

  • Automate: make automatic, or at least systematised (03:10).
  • Delegate: perhaps to a partner, family member, friend or professional service provider (03:31).
  • Eliminate: get rid of completely! (03:48)

Automate

  • Fully automatic: social media, direct debits, comment bank (05:19).
  • Systematised: podcast workflow (Notion template), shopping list (Bring), The Teaching Space Extra (08:00).

Delegate

  • Gardening, cleaning and meal planning (Hello Fresh) - I fully acknowledge my privilege in being able to do this (10:33).
  • Skill swap with friends or family - just ask! I now have a new podcast interview editor… (12:03).

Eliminate

  • To eliminate decisions entirely, form habits (e.g. gym every day etc). Check out habits podcast episode theteachingspace.com/49, as well as James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits (13:34).
  • Examples: wake up time (see the sleep episode theteachingspace.com/109), clothing (like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Barack Obama!) (14:22).
  • Community example: Bob’s robot mower and mulcher (16:05).

Postpone?

  • Sometimes it is better to postpone (16:45).

Over to You

  • What about you? Let’s chat in the community (17:15 ).

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