A checklist for when deciding feels like too much.

If you have read the earlier post on the difference between feeling stuck and being overwhelmed you will know that decision fatigue is less about weakness and more about design. The design of your day, your defaults, and the invisible architecture of how you spend your mental energy.

 This checklist is the practical companion to that piece.

It will not fix a hard week. It will not replace the deeper work of understanding why overwhelm keeps returning, or what it is trying to tell you. But it can help you move from knowing that something needs to change to actually doing something different — today, in the next hour, before the afternoon unravels.

 It is organised around the rhythm of a real day. You do not need to work through all twenty items. Read through them once, pick the two or three that feel most relevant to where you are right now, and try those first.

 Small changes to how you structure your decisions add up. That is not optimism — it is what the research consistently shows.

 You do not need to do all twenty things. Pick three that feel relevant to where you are right now. Try them for a week. See what shifts.

 As I said in the earlier piece: the goal is not to be perfect. It is to design your defaults so that when your capacity dips — and it will, because you are human — the important things are still protected.

P. S. feel free to download and print out the Pdf. Share it with whoever might need it.

Checklist Overwhelm

20 things that actually help with decision fatigue and overwhelm.

Save this for the days when you feel stuck.

☐ MORNING

☐ Name your top 3 priorities — not a full list, just 3

☐ Schedule your hardest decision before noon or right after a break

☐ Automate one trivial choice: breakfast, clothing, first task

☐ Write one if–then plan for a recurring decision that drains you

☐ DURING WORK

☐ Take a real 5–10 min break away from screen between decision blocks

☐ Before meetings: set a cap on unresolved items per session

☐ Use a template or protocol instead of re-deciding routine things

☐ Defer non-urgent decisions after 4pm to tomorrow morning

☐ Batch email replies into two fixed windows — not all day

☐ Ask before late-day decisions: "Would I make this call at 9am?"

☐ MIND AND BODY

☐ Eat something real mid-morning and mid-afternoon

☐ Step outside for 5 minutes — it genuinely restores attention

☐ Reframe "I'm stuck" → "I'm overwhelmed — what do I need?"

☐ Check in with your body at midday: tension is a signal, not noise

☐ EVENING

☐ Brain dump unresolved items into a "parking lot" list

☐ Decide tonight what your first task will be tomorrow

☐ Set a hard stop time for work decisions — evening is recovery

☐ STRUCTURAL

☐ Audit one area where micro-decisions accumulate. Create a default.

☐ Advocate for a scheduled mid-meeting break as a quality measure

☐ If overwhelm is persistent: consider professional support — not as a last resort, but as smart maintenance