171: Decision Fatigue
Brought to you by Pet Sitters Associates
Summary
Have you ever just wished you could stop making decisions? Decision fatigue comes from being overwhelmed with options and the never ending day-to-day decisions we have to make. We share our battle with it and how it can impact you and your business. We also share some of the simple things we can do to manage it. Natasha O’Banion answers the question, “How do I know it’s time to stop a service?”
Topics on this episode:
Where does decision fatigue come from
How does it impact us
What can we do about it?
Ask a Pet Biz Coach with Natasha O’Banion
Main takeaway: Set up protocols and start off-boarding as many decisions as possible so YOU don’t have to make them.
Links:
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
decisions, decision fatigue, business, client, pet, pet sitter, people, stressed, life, confessional, day, combating, big, plate, fatigued, planning, mindset, associates, energy, put
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin, Natasha
Meghan 00:17
Hi, I'm Meghan.
Collin 00:18
I'm Collin. And this is pet sitter
Meghan 00:20
confessional, and open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Hi, welcome to Episode 171.
Collin 00:32
Hello, we're going to be talking about decision fatigue.
Meghan 00:35
Whether this is your first time joining us today or you have been a listener for a long time, we appreciate you we have a back catalogue of 170 other episodes topics in pet care and interviews with some awesome pet care professionals. So you can check those out anytime at pet sitter confessional comm slash Listen, we also want to thank pet sitters associates for sponsoring this episode and our newest Patreon member. Katie, thank you so much.
Collin 01:03
Thank you, Katie.
Meghan 01:05
We love putting these episodes together every week, and hope that you enjoy listening to them. So Katie, thank you so much for donating a few dollars every month to help support what we do here. So late last year, it was on the slower side. For us, it seemed like people really traveled for Thanksgiving, but not for Christmas, so much or for New Year's. However, once the New Year hit people in our town really got the travel bug, they really wanted to travel. And so they have been doing so a lot. We had just on spring break, we had to turn away just as many people over spring break as we did clients that we took on, it was pretty crazy. And since January, our business has almost doubled. So our pet care business went from a second income to now our primary income. And it really doesn't show signs of slowing down. I know with the vaccine, people are really excited, getting to travel more. And hopefully that continues. So we hope your business is seeing this as well. I think we get about five to 10 new inquiries every week, and most of them are turning into clients. And that's great. We are filled to the brim right now. But because of this insane growth, we have had to make a ton of decisions about our business, whether it's scheduling, meet and greets, or which of us will be doing the drop in checks. And obviously, you know the day to day craziness of our personal life with two small kids. So today, we're going to be talking about decision fatigue.
Collin 02:33
We've talked about compassion, fatigue and burnout in the past. And those topics have to deal with constantly being on and not taking time for ourselves. decision fatigue comes from having to make decision after decision after decision for a prolonged period of time. This can come in form of many different things in our lives, whether it's to take on new client like we've been struggling with or not, maybe it's what to charge if you're deciding to raise your prices or not. Maybe it's where to park your car, what to have for breakfast, how to update your website or what to include in that update. We literally make a 1000s of decisions every single day.
Meghan 03:13
Yeah, and it's definitely not helped when we're stressed or tired or just feel overwhelmed.
Collin 03:19
Yeah, 2020 had us pretty stressed about what was going on in the world. And all of a sudden, we had even more decisions to make for our life and for our family. And as Megan said, currently there are things coming up that maybe we weren't expecting, or we're having to grapple with this new growth and how to make space and time for that. In all of that adds up to more stress and more decision fatigue.
Meghan 03:44
Yeah, so have you ever sat down at the end of the day just too exhausted or too mentally worn out to figure out what is for dinner I have. So that's part of decision fatigue, where if you're just don't want to figure it out, you just go out to a restaurant and they figure it out for you. Or if you're trying to plan a big move or a big shift in your business and you just get overwhelmed with all the little decisions that you have to do to get from point A to point B. That is also decision fatigue.
Collin 04:15
So Megan mentioned about how we are increasingly becoming more and more busy and our bookings have gone through the roof. But we've also been trying to recently shift into new services in our area, or trying to work on gaining more droppings and dog walks and are finding it rather challenging as we're doing that and we have no trouble getting boardings or daycares. But for some reason, even with our existing clients, booking for a drop in or daycare is becoming a challenge. And so we are having to do a lot of strategies and new decisions that we have on our table that we didn't expect to have at the beginning of the year. So we've been spending a lot of time and mental energy to make that strategy for that to happen, which means making a lot of very little decisions every day. All day. And all this on top of the other decisions that we're having to make both in our personal and our business life.
Meghan 05:06
If we experienced decision fatigue, it can really also slow the growth of our business, which obviously we don't want. If you take too long to make a decision, you may have wasted time or resources or money. And we talked about doing versus dwelling in Episode 136. And some of that applies here as well. So you don't want to dwell on a decision too much because you have other things to be doing, or you just need to do the action versus thinking about it and overthinking it too much.
Collin 05:37
Yeah, and in this context, what we are trying to get out here is when we are suffering from decision fatigue, some of the end result of that is we make rash decisions, or we put off making decisions. So our business suffers, our personal life suffers. Because that email that we really need to send or that client, we really need to get back in contact to, you know, we just, we just can't muster up the energy to make that decision to a, contact them and B figure out what we're going to do with them and how we're going to charge them and work through all that because we know that on the back end, there's just so much work to do. And so we end up putting it off. Then again, as I said, there's also that side where maybe we don't put it off, but we rush through to make a decision because we just have to get off of our plate. So we end up making not as well informed decisions, where we don't think through all the consequences, we don't take into account all of these different sides of a decision that we would normally do. But we're just so tired, and we just need to move on to the next thing. And we just can't even be bothered. And there's just so much going on. And I need to get this off my plate. And so we say a quick, Yes, no, maybe whatever. And we get we get it away. And you know, we we made the decision, right, you know that's made was that the result we wanted, not sure, but at least we made the decision. And then hopefully, it won't have to come back. Because we see some compounding things here, when we make decisions that aren't the best when we do them in a rushed manner. Nine times out of 10, they have to come back to you to be resolved. And now we've compounded the number of decisions that we've had to make. And if we keep making rushed, decision after rushed decision, we end up having to make 40 or 100 times more decisions at the end of the day than we would have if we had just had the time, energy and mental bandwidth to sit down and to think through everything and to approach it from a much more calm, much more broad focus to much more well informed manner.
Meghan 07:43
Fortunately, though, there are a lot of things that we can do both systematically and with our mindset to work around this
Collin 07:50
setting up systems is a huge thing when combating decision fatigue. What it does is it helps limit the number of decisions that you have to make, you don't have to worry about whether to make a decision or not. When you have a good system in place, whether it's automated or something else, something like having good questions on your intake form or your mean greet form will help immediately weed out any clients. And this is really helpful because it means that you are not having to make the decision as whether to say yes or no to them. Because you can look and see, did they check all the right boxes? Do they meet all of your certain criteria? And that decision has already been made for you based off of the information they have given?
Meghan 08:29
So an example for us is whether the dog is around kids, or if it's good around kids or not. If they say the dog is not, then we immediately say no, that's, you know, not even a decision that we have to think about is just not going to work out for us, especially for boarding and daycare, but also for drop ins, because calling may not always be available to do the drop ends. And if he's not, then I have to bring the kittens
Collin 08:50
and also having a well lined out contract and operations for your business. Not just streamline it for you. But again, you're helping lead to less decisions. Can the client pick up their dog at 8pm? At night? What is your contract? Say? Will you come over 14 times a day? Again? What does your contract say? These kinds of decisions and questions you get from your clients that happen all the time. And when you have them written down and lined out, you don't even have to think about them. It's it's basically off boarding that part of your brain so that you aren't even having to deal with that decision. It's already been made. And now it just has to be followed, which I know sounds overly simplistic because obviously, one of the big problems is not just that we line out our operations and our procedures, but that we then have to stick to them and follow them. And I know we've talked about that on the podcast as well. But at least you're not having to first make the decision and then stick with it. You're cutting out the first half of that equation at least. And now you are just working on the reinforcement. Something you won't have to worry about working on is whenever you bring on pet sitters associates for your insurance, as pet care professionals, your clients trust you to care for their furry family members, pet sitters associates is here to help. For over 20 years pet service associates has provided 1000s of members with quality pet care insurance. If you work in the pet care industry or want to make your passion for pets into a profession, you can take your career to the next level with flexible coverage options, client connections and complete freedom in running your business. Learn why pet sitters associates is the perfect fit for you and get a free quote today. At pet sitter LLC comm you can get a discount when joining by clicking a membership pet sitter confessional and use the discount code confessional checkout to get $10 off today, check out the benefits of membership and insurance once again at pets it llc.com.
Meghan 10:41
When it comes to decision fatigue, there are also things that we can do in just our normal life. So having standard clothing to wear is very helpful. If you have your logo printed on a T shirt or a hoodie, that makes it really easy to go about your day dog walking or doing drop in checks
Collin 10:57
well and so why is this so powerful, this is really powerful because a it not only helps you brand your business and helps people to recognize who you are and where you're going. But it also again, what we're trying to do is limit the number of total decisions that we have to make in any given day and having a standard uniform, not just for your employees if you have them. But for you yourself, it just immediately cuts down on that first decision, the first couple decisions that you have to make in the morning, you don't even have to worry about them. It's not something you stress about or have to plan for the next day, you know, immediately. Well, I'm going to wear my dog walking shirt today. And maybe it's long sleeve because it's cold or short sleeve because it's hot. But that's all you have to do. It's not this mixing and matching or wondering what's going to go together or what's not, it's I wear this shirt with these pants, and you kind of build this little uniform for yourself, whether for your business or just in your personal life as well,
Meghan 11:55
or have a standard routine in the morning or in the evenings to help reduce that decision fatigue. So you know right away, that you're going to be having this meal for dinner on Wednesdays or this meal on Thursdays to doing meal planning a week or more in advance. So in that moment, you are not having to make big decisions.
Collin 12:13
And again, what routines are giving us is they're giving us predictability in our lives. And predictability breeds less overall decisions that we have to make. Because we know the very next step that we have to do we know the very next thing we're doing in our morning routine, that morning routines do a lot more than help combat decision fatigue, they help get us in the right mindset. They help get us geared up for the day and help reassure ourselves that you know we have purpose and we are doing the right things in life morning routines are really, really powerful. Maybe we'll do a whole nother episode on those. But for this purpose, we're building in predictability so that basically without even having to think we know exactly what the next step is, we know exactly what we're going to do. And building those into our business as well. The predictability, the routines, those are standard operating procedures, those are our ways that we operate our business that we train others to do we make them predictable. So nobody is we're decreasing decision fatigue across the board. So that nobody's having to wonder or guess what the next step is, we know what it is because it's predictable, because we already have it planned out.
Meghan 13:29
And so part of combating decision fatigue is taking those moments that we can to pre make as many decisions into the future as we can around little topics and little things so that we don't feel overwhelmed and stressed by them. In that moment. When that time comes.
Collin 13:47
I like to think of this as decision stacking, where when you have those quiet moments, or maybe you have time set aside in your schedule for planning. That is whenever you sit down and you really line out and make a lot of decisions, or you do as much decision making as you can, in that time period, again, stacking decision upon decision. Being in that mode, you're already making other decisions, you're bringing them all together. And what this does is it means we're pre planning time to make decisions so that we're not making them as on the fly as we have to. And we're making them during a pre planned time, so that we are not having to make them when we are fatigued or stressed or worried or sad or hungry or whatever other things would get in the way of us making good sound decisions. We're planning out that time and we are using it to make good solid decisions as best as we possibly can.
Meghan 14:42
And this goes right into tackling the hard stuff first. So a lot of us like to procrastinate, I know I am one of them. We like to procrastinate on the decisions that we don't really want to make, especially if they're hard or they're unpleasant or we have a lot of stuff right on them, they are really weighty decisions. But tackling the biggest decisions early in the day is the best option. This is when you are mentally energized, you're fresh, you're ready to go. And your willpower is really the strongest, you'll make the sharpest decisions in the morning. So start each day by asking, so of all the things you have to do on your list today, think about which ones will move your business forward the most. Which ones would you be glad to complete before you run out of steam, it's the one decision that you'll be glad that you made today.
Collin 15:36
I've heard it put another way of eating the frog first. And after you've eaten the frog, everything else will basically taste better or be wonderful. So especially whenever you are facing down or trying to deal with procrastinating or putting things off and not wanting to make the decision, swallow the hardest thing possible first and get that out of the way. Because then you know all of the easy things are going to follow. Now that does take again, some pre planning, lining the whole process out or getting everything written down and put in front of you. So you can make a well informed decision. And only you can make that about you and what you feel like is going to be a big decision or not. I know for me a big decision and big things that I have to get out of my way are trying to deal with emails and getting back to people. That is very stressful for me for whatever reason. But I know that if I can answer at least one, maybe two emails, first thing, it really sets the whole workflow for the rest of the day and gets me off on a really great foot.
Meghan 16:38
If you truly are overwhelmed, though, and you don't know what to do, think about bringing in someone else to talk it over with. So I do this with Collin a lot. If I'm stressed out and I can't figure out what to do in a particular situation, I'll go to him because he often has a clear head and we'll see the situation objectively versus I'm trying to bring in a bunch of emotions to it and trying to figure out what to do. But he knows what to do because he is a third party coming in. And we'll see it objective,
Collin 17:07
or as objectively as I can, I guess but it really does speak to the importance of having people around you that you can take these kind of questions do that you can take these kind of problems too. And really surrounding yourself with people from all different backgrounds and all different perspectives is really going to help you make the best decision possible. Every
Meghan 17:28
single decision that you make in a day, whether it's as insignificant as the size of coffee, you order at Starbucks, or selecting the best strategy going forward for your business. That all requires mental energy. And so unfortunately, decision fatigue is unavoidable. But it is controllable, you can reduce the amount of mental energy drain with habits, we talked about habit stacking before in a previous episode, create little habits that lead to bigger habits over time. And that will help with your mental energy. It will prevent you from having to make such a big decisions all the time. So like brushing your teeth, it really doesn't require a lot of mental energy, you just kind of do it.
Collin 18:11
And that that word is so important when we're discussing decision fatigue, energy and energy levels. When we have low energy and energy levels, when it comes to making decisions, we tend to make quick rash decisions to just get them off of our plate. I know I fall victim to this time and time again, where I'm so tired of making decisions. I just go with a quick yes or no with the next thing that gets put on my desk, I don't even really look at it, I don't really give it a second thought. Now, this is good because it gets it off my plate. It's bad because I am not fully present fully in the moment giving the best possible decision with all of the information taking into account that I possibly can. I'm just doing it as a knee jerk reaction to have to try and stop making decisions. And the faster I get these off my plate, the less decisions I'm going to have to make moving forward. Now, I don't think that that's a healthy mindset for us to be in of Oh, if I could just stop making decisions, then I'd have more energy,
Meghan 19:10
because unfortunately, we're human. So we are always going to have to make decisions,
Collin 19:14
right? There are always be things coming down the pipeline, what is much better is getting a system set in place. Whether that is having a third party you can go to whether that is eating the frog first. Or maybe it may be you know, it's eating the frog first or how do you eat an elephant one small bite at a time. So maybe you decide you want to take small pieces, small chunks and work your way up to the hard ones. It's a lot like test taking strategies. Whenever you sit down to take a big test. Many people will say skim through the whole test. Focus on the ones that you don't know. And so you can spend a lot of time on those and then answer the easy ones at the back end versus knocking out all the easy ones first and then really grinding away at the harder ones hoping that along the way. You may pick up some context clues to answer those, it's down to personality, it's down to how you have your schedule set up. And it's really down to just personal preference and experiment with these kinds of systems, experiment with ways and different people to bring in. It's not just having the same person that you always go to having a group of people that you can call that you can sit down with, that you can discuss maybe various topics with, so that you can have input from all different sorts of angles, all different sorts of viewpoints and backgrounds to really help you work through that process to have a much better holistic approach in view at the decision that you have before you. And again, the more you get to talk about it, the more you're going to see that big picture. Because many times whenever we keep these decisions in our head, they become really big, they become really scary. We feel like nobody else understand those no one else knows exactly what's going on. But as soon as we start vocalizing them and verbalizing them, and letting other people hear them, we get to start processing them verbally at that point in auditorially, we get to start sensing them and feeling them in a different way, getting them out in the open as instead, instead of just in our head. And many times, what happens is what was so big and scary in our head, is actually quite little is actually a lot smaller than we anticipated or easier to conquer than we had built it up to be. So sometimes just by talking about it is really a great way to overcome that decision fatigue, because you start seeing Okay, I understand this is not that big of a deal, I was really worked up about this, and I just didn't have the energy to deal with it. But I see now that it's just gonna take two minutes, and I can get off my plate and I can move on.
Meghan 21:44
Another thing that will help with combating decision fatigue is before you go to bed at night, writing down three things that you want to accomplish the next day, that way your brain can rest. And you won't stay awake and making even more decisions about what you'll do when you first wake up, I really need to implement this. Because I have terrible sleep patterns.
Collin 22:05
Well, that too, when you're sitting there trying to sleep and you're thinking about all of these things that you're having to process or you're worried about things next day. One of the things that that's about is you tend to worry about forgetting things or worry about not doing things our brains are amazing at creating, they are terrible, absolutely terrible and rubbish at remembering, at least maybe that's just me, maybe I just suffer from being terrible at remembering things. But the more I can afford this stuff, the more we can write it down, whether that's in an app, whether it's on a journal, as Opie's slps for your business, the more you can get that off of your out of your head, the less likely you are to forget it. And the less likely you are to worry about forgetting it because you know, it's down and put away somewhere. So it's a great way to just decompress at the end of the day writing write down not just what you want to get accomplished in the next day, but decompressing about all the things you're worried about from that day, so that you can put your head at night knowing I didn't forget anything, there's nothing for me to worry about. Because it's all over there on that sheet of paper. And I can reference it tomorrow if I need to.
Meghan 23:08
And with that, we also have to address our mindset around our decisions.
Collin 23:13
And it's really our mindset about how much deliberation each decision actually needs to have on it. Yes, there are those ones that you need to sit down and you need to bury yourself into and bring in all the information and bringing your council members and discuss everything that's going on. But not every decision needs that level of involvement in that level of deliberation. It's understanding which should be deliberated, and which should not be and this is not just whether they are important or not, but how much of an impact they will have on your life or how much you care about or not. So obviously something that is not important and that will not impact you and that you don't care about doesn't really need to be deliberated at all. And then it scales from there to the really important really impactful and really passionate decisions that need to be deliberated. So, decision fatigue is the end result after a prolonged period of constant bombardment of little or sometimes even big decisions every single day. It is even more so compounded on whenever we are fatigued when we are tired or when our emotions are involved in our emotions are heightened. Some of the biggest periods where we go through decision fatigue or when our emotions are at their highest because every single decision is just the biggest thing and we feel like it has the most impact on everything going on around us. And the problem starts to come in when we let this impact the future decisions that we make where decisions where we would have made more of a deliberation and we would have thought about it more. We quickly get off of our plate because we just can't even be bothered. But there are things that we can do about it setting in good protocols building in good habits and bringing in good people around you to support you and to bounce off ideas with you.
Meghan 25:06
We would love to know if you have suffered from decision fatigue, and more importantly, what have you done to overcome it, you can let us know at petsitter confessional on Facebook and Instagram or you can leave us a voicemail, we love those at 636-364-8260 pet business coach and Tasha opionion is going to answer the question, when to know it's time to stop offering service.
Natasha 25:29
So this is I love this question. Because a lot of people hold on to service as long as they should, you should stop offering a service if it's not conducive to your business structure to your happiness and your staffs happiness. And so let's say for example, for instance, we had a daycare provider, and they've offered a service, the client no longer was a great fit, but they said, You know what, I'll just start offering walks now because we have a need. Okay, well, that's gonna be a service that you don't want to provide because it's not conducive to your business, and friends. And you have, I've had this so many times, I've had clients who all move out of an area or area gets gentrified, and everybody gets shipped out and moved to a new location, I only have one or two dangling customers there. And then, after two years or so the territory just never turned over. And I say listen, unfortunately, had to make the decision to transfer service area to this location, that service area just no longer is conducive to the business, it doesn't make sense to drive over there, you're letting the client down. Because you know, you're putting him on the end of the schedule, you know, you're not giving them your number one all the time, because they're kind of out of the way until they're getting the end of the time window or the end of your exhaustion, you know, they're not getting the full value that you could give them. So it no longer makes sense doesn't make time sense. It doesn't make money sense. And it's not bringing you or the team joy. Anytime you have to say, oh, okay, I have to go over there now. Or Oh, and I feel that way about pet sitting in my business, I would be at a barbecue laughing with friends. And then I would you know, go to the client's house at seven. And then I would say, oh, okay, alright, guys, I gotta leave you because I got to go do a mid day. And then I'll have another four hour break. And then I'll have to go back to the client again at 10. That just didn't bring me joy. And I didn't feel it. So I asked my staff and I like to be honest, no, we're doing enough business and the day that we really don't need it. And nobody wanted it anymore. Nobody was opting to take it. So I said, All right, we got to remove it. So we got to take out petsitting because we had increased job walking so much. And everyone was like, Oh, I really don't want it the morning. And then I have to do the midday and then I have to do the night. It's just I'd rather be you know, hanging out with friends and family. And I said I agree. You know, but there's all kinds of variables. A lot of us are pet sitters, and we have different staff that we can have them take the morning shift, and I see there's a lot of work around, right. But that's just a small example of, you know, doing things that you may get that where they want to or having that client that makes you Oh god, they're calling me they're texting me. That means you typically should break way the way to handle that is just sticking to the facts. Okay, don't make it overly emotional. Don't overly Explain yourself. stick to the facts and facts are usually handled within three sentences, three or four sentences covers facts. If you're going any more than that you're now getting emotional and opening yourself up for well what if And what about and that's not fair, just picked up the data and it always bring you home.
Meghan 28:29
Natasha not only runs her own dog walking business, but she is an awesome pet business coach as well. And if you would like to partner with her on your pet business, you can go to our website, start scale sale, calm and use the code PSC 20 for 15% off her coaching, we would like to thank PSA pet sitters associates and our awesome new Patreon, Katie for sponsoring this episode and being part of all that we are doing here. We really appreciate you guys taking the time and listening to this today. These are so much fun to put together. And we hope you join us next time.
Collin 29:01
Right We know that there is a lot there are a lot of places that you could go for information. And so we really just genuinely cannot tell you enough how much it means for you to listen every single week for you to share the episodes and for you to give the wonderful feedback that you do. You are really helping to be part of a wonderful community and we are so thankful to be a part of it as well.
