This was an email I sent to Graham: I also noticed that you've been thinking a lot about how to reduce the number of decisions you make every day/week. You've got me thinking about it as well. I have a few thoughts, but only one important one. I can think of a bunch of strategies to reduce the number of decisions we make, from developing habits to reducing the number of things we do every day to flipping a coin. But you know what I realized is true for me? And what trumps _all_ my strategies.  A _mission_.  When I have a mission, a purpose, and a single minded direction, there are very few decisions to make.  This mission has to be a mission _for myself_, it can't be a mission like "grow a company", which is too vague and it's not about _my_ decisions, it's about my _company's_ decisions. But when I have a purpose and a goal that is clear to me, I don't have to make decisions. I almost instantly know what the answer is. Right now, I feel like I'm coming out of a purposeless period in my life when I couldn't do much, in large part due to the pandemic. Before the pandemic, my mission was to get really good at talking to people. So when I went to swing dance lessons, I didn't go to dance, I went for the _people_. And when I asked myself, "do I really feel like dancing tonight?" - and the answer to that question was often "no" - I always said yes because in truth I was making a totally different decision: "do I want to meet and talk to people?" and the answer to that _had to be_ "yes". I had no other options. The decision was so clear, it barely even registered as a decision. --- Making decisions takes a lot of energy. That's why it's good to find ways to make less decisions on a day to day basis - find ways to automate low impact decisions - so that we have the energy to tackle the hard decisions. Having "algorithms", if-then statements, that automatically decide for you what you will do in a certain set of circumstances, is another way to say the same thing: automate decision making so that you're constantly taking healthy actions without needing to use your willpower to decide whether or not to do it.