Volume 4, Issue 12: Make Fewer Choices
This is typically a paid subscriber-only issue of Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice but this one is public. I appreciate your support for my work!
Hi friends! I just had a ridiculous amount of fun putting this together for my readers and IG followers who like my cooking and baking shenanigans. I’m still frequently falling apart but getting back to the things I love. Being in the kitchen, reading, and writing snail mail have done a lot to help me start piecing myself back together after a remarkably shitty first half of 2023. I decided to start the year fresh on July 1st and you’re welcome to join me. My focus will be on finding my way back to who I am and making space for all the multitudes I contain. No biggie, haha. It will be an ongoing project.
Today I have a small bit of advice that has made a huge difference for my well-being: take away the choice from things that don’t make a huge difference. I know, it seems counterintuitive. Choice is good! Choice is important! Yes, we are Pro-Choice! It’s a privilege to have choices of what to eat or what job is available to you or what you can wear, watch, or listen to. I am not saying to remove the choice away from the things where you truly want or need to exercise that choice. What I am saying, though, is that sometimes I am overwhelmed by decisions and that can lead to inaction and not making a decision at all (or the decision is that I curl up and stare at my phone).
I think James Clear talks a lot about how having to make decisions can get in the way of habit-forming in his book Atomic Habits (which is not a perfect book, but there are some helpful takeaways). We all spend spell slots on decision-making each day, some more than others. I’ve been working on trying to cut down the number of decisions I don’t need to make and to increase my bandwidth for the ones I do. This can be incredibly hard for me, a person who thinks everything is equally important all the time. I’ve been really scattered and unfocused with unpacking and organizing lately (we’ve hit a plateau) so I got some help picking out where to start. I am working on finishing up the kitchen, the part of the house I spent the majority of my time in if I’m not on the computer or sleeping. It’s been incredibly helpful because now I don’t have to think about “what to do oh my god there are still boxes everywhere” because the answer is “kitchen.” When it’s done, I’ll pick a new thing. Maybe I'll make a list and roll a D20.
Sometimes (always) I’m overwhelmed by my to do list and while I can do a bit of prioritizing, it can also help to just randomly assign numbers after prioritizing and put it in some kind of order so I don’t have to think about “what to do next.” My most recent win in taking away the decision-making has been with snail mail. I went through our address book and made a list of all the folks who are always open to receiving snail mail. The list has 47 rows. Every day, I use a random number generator to see who gets a postcard. Once in a while I determine that I want to send mail to a specific person but I like the surprise it gives me when I pick a number and see who turns up. I’ve mentioned before that I have about a dozen of the same black shirts that I wear for work Zoom meetings. If it’s cold, I wear a cardigan. These little changes free up space for me to not get frustrated when deciding what to have for lunch or what podcast to listen to while I do something tedious.
I’m sure someone out there who thinks of people as machines would refer to this as “streamlining my processes” but I just think of it as doing less of what I don’t want to do so I can do more of what I do want to do.
Hope this helps!
That’s it for this week! You can shop any books I’ve mentioned in this newsletter at my affiliate shop, The Infophile’s Bookshop, and support independent bookstores. If you want to send me some snail mail, you can find me at P.O. Box 21481, Oakland, CA 94620-1481. If you are a subscriber and would like for me to send you some happy mail, feel free to give me your address.
If you enjoy this newsletter, here are ways to show your support for my writing and resource curation (other than spreading the word, of course!):
That’s it for this week! You can shop many books I’ve mentioned in this newsletter at my affiliate shop, The Infophile’s Bookshop, and support independent bookstores. In fact, any Bookshop, Amazon, or Etsy links in this newsletter are affiliate links so if you shop through those, it helps support my work. Or you can leave me a tip on Ko-fi, Paypal, or Venmo.
If you want to send me some snail mail, you can find me at P.O. Box 21481, Oakland, CA 94620-1481.
You can find our podcast, Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts.