FIOs

I get hit by decision fatigue very often. It happening now – I need to book a trip but I don’t want to figure out my dates because there are a lot of other scheduling to be sorted out in order for me to figure out the travel dates. I would rather not book that trip until closer to date.

This is a bad cycle because when you have decision fatigue, you tend to escape from issues, but you know it is there in the back of your mind…haunting you. Then you develop this anxiety. The more anxious you are, the more you actually overthink about it which leads to more anxiety. And then you break down.

You gotta realise, sometimes doing the thing is actually less difficult than making the decision to go and do it. It is mostly the case. You are anxious about registering for an assessment; it is because you are overthinking about the unknowns, you don’t know if you will fail, you don’t know how it’ll go, but seriously, just go and do it and all those unknown will become known. What is there to be anxious about when all is known?

Go make that decision. Go schedule that appointment. Go call that angry client. Go get your tests booked. Get it done and get it over with, then move on. The situations don’t bite, it’s your fatigue mental state that’s causing all the anxiety which overstates the negativities. Your fatigue mental state would not go and suggest anything good will ever happen because by default, you try to protect yourself, your thoughts give out warnings of the potential bad things that would happen.

But of course, in more serious situations, you need data to help you make informed decisions. Recently in my personal finance world, I have decided that I would take profits on some stocks that have had massive runs. For many years I did not trade in and out, but I have come to realize that this management style is no longer suitable for my current needs. I spent a long time trying to figure out when to sell; I get worried to sell out of my long term holding positions and miss the bigger run. I know I need to develop a method to help me ease my decision fatigue. Once I have developed a way to follow technical analysis in a systemic way and learn where the support/resistance zones of a stock are, I set my sell targets ahead of time, sometimes waiting for months until the targets would hit. Once I sold something, I go back to my technical analysis, I set the buy back order at a price I wouldn’t mind buying again and just leave it there. Having this system in place works really well for me: 1) the decision fatigue of whether to sell or not to sell and at what price; 2) once I have a system, I use it to set up trades at target prices that I got based on analysis of data, systemically removing my decision fatigue. After decisions are made, I just let the stock price comes to meet my target prices (trusting the universe is a big part of this too); 3) I achieve my objective to take profits and potentially buy back lower at zones without the mental overload.

When you face decision fatigue, tell yourself that all will be fine. Develop a system that works for yourself in handling different types of situations. Once you make that decision, things will fall into the right place.

I gotta go book that flight now. Go FIO.