Decision Arbitrage Theory: The energy expenditure of the small decisions we make, tax us the most. Due to the insignificance of the decisions, our decisions are no better than randomness in their effect.
We make a dizzying amount of decisions every day. Very few of those actually have any noticeable effect on our life. The theory is simply if we changed any of those small decisions nothing in your life would materially change. Yet despite this, we spend a large amount of energy making these decisions. This is simply the issue of being free to pick among an ever expanding set of choices.
What This Means
Decisions should be eliminated or offloaded to randomness. If the decisions simply don’t make an impact on our lives, we shouldn’t be spending energy on them. This also allows us to take note that most of the decisions we make aren’t that important. How can we make a wrong choice if we could have chosen anything? It also exposes the issues of freedom of choice. That we can overburden ourselves to simply prove how free we are. It exerts energy in vain. We should simply be focusing on the decisions that matter.
An Example
What we choose to wear is probably the most popular example of this. Many successful people have talked about how they streamlined this process by wearing the same thing or a simple variation of things. This allows them to avoid spending energy on these decisions that don’t have a significant impact on their life.
