Decision Fatigue Is About to Become the Next Burnout

I’ve done a lot of different jobs since I started working at 16. If I look back at my life and career, it becomes glaringly clear that the root of my work (and how I got here) is about watching, predicting, and responding to patterns. Which is why I want to make a prediction: decision fatigue is about to become the next big buzzword in productivity.

That’s not to say that it isn’t a well-known term already, it is. I’ve been coaching clients on it for years. It’s a cornerstone of why I build sustainable systems the way I do and have my whole life.

But I give it another ~3-6 months before the term starts to show up in every headline, every leadership deck, every wellness campaign, and more than a couple social media trends or viral moments.

Watch the signs with me. In the last several months:

When four different publications invent four different names for the same experience within months of each other, that's not confusion. Nope, that’s a buzzword in its larva stage. Eventually the market will settle on one word, and the search data suggests it already has. The word that was coined originally: decision fatigue.

(Yes, I see the irony of the jargon generators working overtime to name the experience of having too much to process. The machine cannot help itself.)

The prediction is the easy half. It’s the thing that will get everyone’s attention.

But the headlines will skip something: the lab science underneath decision fatigue is messier than the articles imply. The original research — ego depletion, the idea that willpower is a fuel tank that drains with each choice — has had real replication problems. Some studies find the effect. Some don't. Scientists are still arguing.

And you know, intimately, what happens after work, standing in front of the refrigerator, unable to answer "what do you want for dinner" like it's an essay prompt in a language you no longer speak.

Both things are true. The mechanism is debated. The experience is not. The experience is real precisely because it was never just about willpower, but volume. The number of decisions a person is expected to process in a day has exploded. Work decisions, multiplied by AI tools. Life decisions, multiplied by infinite options. And underneath it all, the background hum of decisions demanded by a world that feels genuinely unstable.

Your brain isn't weak.
Your brain is over-subscribed.

Which is why I’m worried about the buzzword era we're about to enter.

I've seen this movie before. When burnout became a household word, the diagnosis was structural, but the prescriptions were individual. The problem got named as workloads and cultures and systems. The majority of solutions sold were bubble baths, morning routines, and resilience training.

The storm got named, and we got sold an umbrella.

And to be fair, nobody can stop the rain. The sheer volume of decisions coming at you was never, and isn’t now, a personal failing you could willpower away. But an umbrella only works while your own arm is holding it up. A roof keeps you dry while you sleep. Both count as shelter, sure. But one asks for effort once and maintenance over time, while the other only works when you do the entire lift every time.

Decision fatigue is lining up for the same treatment. The early advice is already circulating: limit your choices, be more disciplined, decide faster. In other words… the problem is that you're making too many decisions, so the solution is to get better at making decisions.

We are about to be told to decide harder. But deciding harder is how we got here.

The way through — the one I've watched work in my own life and in client work for years — is deciding less, by design. Building structures where a decision gets made once, on purpose, by a version of you that has capacity, so it doesn't get re-made every day by a version of you that doesn't.

And I have to be honest about the trap inside that, too, because the systems world (my world, hi, it's me) has its own umbrella problem. We were all taught to build systems like fortresses: pour in enormous effort up front, and expect to never face the problem again. Then life shifts. A season changes. A body has needs. The system asks for maintenance, because everything alive does. And we don't say "the system needs tending." We say "the system failed" or “I failed at using this system.” Now we're exhausted twice: once by the decisions, once by the shame.

I've done this. Repeatedly. Some of my finest fortress ruins have their own plots in the productivity graveyard.

A sustainable system isn't a fortress. It's closer to a garden. You build it once, yes, but it’s built with the expectation of being tended. Expecting seasons. Expecting the person maintaining it to be a human being with fluctuating everything.

And since you know my love of nuance, it’s worth pointing out that tending isn't the only thing a garden is for. Nobody plants a garden purely for the weeding.

The fortress model feels good when you hear it because it gives our exhausted brain something attractive: do this once and never worry about it again. But that simplicity gets something wrong about human beings. All of us, and my fellow neurodivergent folks especially, need routine and we rebel against it. Both things are true at once.

Novelty isn't a threat to the systems that help maintain our lives and work (we aren’t talking a factory production line here where novelty literally equals danger). Novelty here is a nutrient. Because a structure with no room for whim, for joy, for connection, for the random Tuesday obsession, won't get maintained. It gets abandoned. And then we call the abandonment a discipline problem.

So when I say sustainable system, I don't only mean one that survives maintenance. I mean one with room deliberately built in. Designed to flex with room to delight. Designed for the parts of your life and your business that keep insisting on being connected no matter how many times you're told to keep them separate. Your system's job should always be to support how you actually work. Your energy patterns. Your real capacity. And your actual life — routine, chaos, joy, and all.

So here's the one thought to sit with this week, before the buzzword arrives and the umbrella salesmen with it:

As always, it’s not about trying to become someone new. The goal is that every decision your system makes once is one your tired brain never gets billed for again.