Dealing with Decision Fatigue

What's up, everybody? Welcome to a new episode of the p w podcast. And, yes, it has been a minute, hasn't it? That's partly what I'm gonna talk about here. I have been crazy super busy this year so far, and it just continues to go that way.

I guess you could say it's good, and sometimes it's bad. It really depends. Right? I have received great feedback on the miniseries that I did regarding making an app. I'll put a link in the show notes for that.

And so thank you to all of you that reached out and shared your opinions on that. Greatly appreciate it. Happy to say they were all positive as well, which was nice. So thank you for that. Moving on from that, I have been very busy with personal projects, but they take time.

Now the reason they take time is just like these podcasts that I do, I'm a one person operation. Right? I have a full time day job and then just me to do everything else with one exception, which is the compulsive podcast. I have a cohost on there. But other than that, I do everything myself, and it's a case of fitting everything in where you can.

So I've been doing some live streams as well. I try to keep those pretty darn regular if I can, doing some gameplay on there and some game development, app development, all of those kind of things. And, unfortunately, sometimes you have to pick and choose which ones you wanna work on. And that's been sort of part of the problem lately is a lot of things I wanna do, a lot of things that I wanna keep alive, and projects that I wanna keep going, but at the same time trying to figure out, okay, which one should I work on today? And it doesn't matter how much I try and schedule these things and say, day x, I'm gonna do this project.

For any of you creative folks out there, you know how it goes. You cannot be creative to a schedule every time, and that's where it's at. So I'm putting this episode in here because I wanna talk a little bit about that along with some other things based around this idea of decision fatigue. Right? And especially as we get into this part of the year, if you are a software developer, for example, you know that a lot of the big conferences start taking place.

There's the Google one. There's the Apple one, Microsoft one, and a lot of independent ones as well. The cohost on compile swift podcast was lucky enough to go to deep dish swift this year. I'll put a link in the show notes if you're interested in that podcast episode. He sat down with some friends and fellow developers and had a conversation there.

I didn't get to go because I was just super crazy busy with the day job. And that is also a place where decision fatigue can kick in because we know that we have a million different ways of doing just about everything. And at some point, you have to decide, okay. This is how I'm gonna do this thing, whatever it may be, and you go with it, and you go forward. And for those of you who have been there, you will know what this is like.

When it comes to software, for example, or hardware, anything for that matter, but I'm gonna choose software as an example here, because you have so many options, you can just find yourself with decision fatigue. Right? Whether it's tools or platforms or what am I gonna make? How am I gonna make it? What should I use?

It can just grind you to a halt very quickly, and you will drive yourself nuts trying to figure out, okay. What should I do? Because whichever one you pick, you will always question, oh, this is the wrong one. I should have gone with the other one. It's gonna happen.

It just happens every time. It's buyer's remorse for software developers. And that's the thing where, at this point, what I say to myself now is just forget all that. Go make the thing. Doesn't matter what I'm gonna use.

Obviously, I have preferred tool sets. So I just pick one of those, and I go with it. And I make the thing. Because otherwise, I will spend forever trying to figure out the best way to make something and never actually make it. And I know so many of you have been there with that.

Now this doesn't always work out, of course, but it's a stepping stone. It is the first step on the path of I'm actually doing the thing I wanna do. Unless you're doing something like DevOps where, you know, you're maintaining all these tools and upgrading all these tools and doing all of that kind of thing for you and everybody else, your primary role is making things. And therefore, at some point, you've got to sit down and make it. Right?

And you can have decision fatigue with overplanning. Underplanning is very easy, but overplanning is a lot easier to get wrong, I think, because you can bury yourself in the details, and you just never get past it. Right? So for example, you might have a design document or some idea for whatever it may be, a book, an article, a blog post, a podcast, a photoshoot, whatever it is, a game, and pick your creative endeavor of choice, you're gonna have this problem where, you know what? I've overthought this.

And I've overthought it so much that the idea of doing this project, I absolutely hate it now. And you either walk away or you just it goes on the back burner and you procrastinate with it. So decision fatigue is a real thing. And at some point, you learn that, hey, you know what? Let it go.

Don't let that and peer pressure influence you. Pick something you know or want to know and go with it and make the thing. Right? Get past those decisions. Don't even worry yourself about, is it right?

Is it wrong? Will this work? Will that not work out? What are the pitfalls? Sometimes you just gotta create these things and go with it.

Right? So just putting that out there as a short update on this episode. Gonna speak more about this because it is a big topic. And I'll give you a few examples that I've been through in an upcoming episode, mostly around software and software development and platforms and that kind of thing. But if you are having this problem, just get past it.

Just say, you know what? Screw it. I'm just gonna do it and go make the thing. That's it, folks. I will speak to you in the next episode.

If you like what you're hearing here, I'll leave a rating, leave a review. Reach out to me, peter witham.com/contact If you wanna come and talk about that, love to because I know so many people suffer from it. For that matter, if you have other topics you wanna come on and talk about, great. Let's get a conversation going.

Reach out and contact me. Other than that, folks, have a great one. Speak to in the next episode.