I audited my own advice from 2022. It didn’t survive.
Four years and 60 apps after my first decision-fatigue post, here’s what I’d actually tell you — and the embarrassing part I left out back then.
In 2022 I wrote a post about beating decision fatigue. Then I built a hobby that manufactures it. This is the audit — and the five decisions my system now makes for me.
Hey friends,
This week I did something I’d recommend to anyone who’s been writing (or just working) for a few years: I went back and re-read my own advice.
In 2022, I published a post called Decision Fatigue: Not so known enemy of personal productivity. Five neat prescriptions — Accept, Act, Automate, Cut Your Options, Build Focus. Earnest stuff. I re-read it last week expecting to feel proud.
Instead, I found a contradiction I’d been living inside for four years.
The embarrassing part first
In that post I wrote: “cut down your options — limited choices.”
Then I spent the next four years reviewing 60+ productivity apps, switching task managers almost yearly, migrating my notes across four systems, and at one point paying for five overlapping subscriptions in the same month (you read that confession two issues ago).
Every app switch is a hundred small decisions — which features, which structure, what to migrate, what to abandon. I wrote a post about decision fatigue and then built a hobby that manufactures it.
Nobody in this niche admits that. So I’ll go first.
Grading 2022-me
The quick scorecard:
“Accept that no decision is right or wrong” — held up, but incomplete. Acceptance without a mechanism is a nice quote you forget by Tuesday. The mechanism I added: sort by reversibility. If I can undo it in a week, I decide in minutes. If I can’t — a pricing commitment, a hire — I slow down on purpose. 2022-me treated all decisions at one speed. That was the flaw.
“Think less, act more” — half right, and the wrong half was dangerous. True for 80% of daily choices. Terrible for the ones that matter. In my day job, the expensive mistakes I’ve watched were almost never slow decisions. They were fast ones, made confidently, on incomplete information.
“Automate” — the winner. Day theming and time blocking survived all four years. But automation in 2022 meant routines. In 2026 it means something bigger — systems that make the decision before I arrive at it. More below.
“Cut your options” — right idea, wrong target. Not your wardrobe. Your tool-stack. “Which app does this go in?” is a decision you make forty times a day without noticing. Going from eight tools to three erased more micro-decisions than any life-simplification hack I’ve tried.
“Build focus” — backwards. I thought focus improves decisions. It’s the reverse: removing decisions is what creates focus. Focus isn’t a muscle. It’s what’s left when the noise is gone.
The five decisions my system makes without me
This is the part 2022-me had no access to. My real, paid-for stack — the three tools plus capture layer that survived this year’s purge — each one exists to delete a recurring decision:
“What do I work on next?” → Superlist. Ordered the night before. When an escalation blows up the plan by 10:30 (it will), I don’t re-plan the day — I just take the next thing. The deciding happened yesterday.
“Where does this thought go?” → Wispr Flow into one inbox. Speak it, sort it later in one batch. Ten filing decisions become one sorting session. Batching decisions is the cheapest productivity win nobody talks about.
“What did we agree last quarter?” → Obsidian/Workflowy (Using it for a more than a month). Half of decision fatigue is re-deciding things you already decided because you can’t find the original reasoning. Searchable notes I own means an old decision stays decided.
“Is this trade-off worth it?” → Claude. The one that didn’t exist in 2022. Before any heavy decision, I ask it to attack my reasoning — not to give me an answer, but to hand me the counter-argument I can’t see from inside my own head. 2022-me had “sleep on it.” 2026-me has a sparring partner on demand.
“Am I on track?” → Coda (Superhuman Docs), one weekly review page. On the calendar, so “should I check the big picture?” is never a live question. Recurring decisions belong on a schedule, not in your head.
The rewrite
If I were writing the 2022 post today, the list would be:
Sort by reversibility. Two speeds. Never confuse them.
Batch the small stuff. One inbox, sorted once.
Make the system decide. Your best decision is one yesterday-you already made.
Keep old decisions findable. Never pay for the same decision twice.
Rent a counter-argument. Confidence is not information.
And the meta-rule I earned the hard way: your tool-stack is a decision generator. Every app promises to save time and quietly bills you in daily micro-choices.
The 2022 post treated decision fatigue as a discipline problem. That was the real mistake. It’s a systems problem. You don’t out-discipline it — you design it out, then spend the reclaimed energy on the few decisions each week that deserve it.
If this landed: I do one of these each week — real systems, tested against a real B2B day job, no course to sell you at the end. If someone forwarded you this email, subscribe here and you’ll get the next one. And if you’ve been reading a while, forwarding this to one person who’s drowning in apps is the single best way to support the newsletter.
Hit reply and tell me: what’s one piece of your own old advice that didn’t survive contact with your actual life? I read every email — those replies are where next week’s post usually starts.
Stay productive,
A note on affiliates: I’m an affiliate for Superlist, Workflowy and Wispr Flow. They appear here because they are tested and used and proven to be a useful productivity app, at no extra cost to you.
P.S. Next week: how I use Claude as a decision partner for my actual day job — pricing calls, difficult customer emails, territory trade-offs. Nobody in this niche writes about AI from a non-tech corporate seat. I’m going to.
Thank you for reading,
Keep reading, Keep sharing.
Astu.
-Kaushik (SystemsAndFlow)