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- #218: Thriving in a World of Decision Fatigue
#218: Thriving in a World of Decision Fatigue
This productivity framework will help prevent burnout
Jenae Spry
September 19, 2025
Productivity Stacks Newsletter
(Formerly Productivity Express)
Issue No. 218
The Best in Evidence-Based Productivity
for Small Business Owners, Freelancers & Founders
Helping You Work Smarter and Live More
The Rundown
Thriving in a World of Decision Fatigue
The Most Important LinkedIn Profile Feature You Aren't Using
This productivity framework will help prevent burnout
How I use Google Messages to stay organized beyond texting
Sierra CEO Bret Taylor on why the AI bubble feels like the dotcom boom
👉Did you miss an issue? Check out previous Productivity Stacks issues anytime here
🔥Quote/Prompt
Don’t be afraid to be amazing.
Use the quote as a writing or thinking prompt to finish your week strong.
A bit from mine:
(posted in our Doer Entrepreneurs Free Community — off social media)
Can we talk about fear for a second?
It seems to be the culprit when it comes to things ranging from procrastination to never taking action on […]
Did someone forward this to you?
📈 Performance
Making a thousand tiny decisions every day is exhausting your brain before you even get to the important stuff. This Psychology Today piece reveals how top executives protect their mental energy by eliminating unnecessary choices—and why this strategy could transform how you run your business.
"For more than 10 years, Page has exercised every single day, eliminating the daily negotiation of 'should I or shouldn't I?' He eats the same salad for lunch and keeps a closet full of nearly identical shirts, blue and white, with dark suits ready for any professional occasion. His habits might sound extreme, but by conserving mental energy on small matters, he's free to focus on the choices that really count."
Key Insights:
Decision fatigue is real and measurable—each small choice depletes the same mental resources needed for strategic business decisions. For example, choosing what to wear, what to eat, and whether to exercise all drain from the same cognitive tank.
Creating automatic routines for trivial decisions isn't about being boring—it's about strategic energy conservation. Like Obama wearing only gray or blue suits during his presidency, establishing defaults for daily choices preserves mental stamina for high-stakes calls.
The real foundation for sustained performance lies in non-negotiable habits around diet, exercise, meditation, and sleep. These aren't wellness add-ons but essential infrastructure that makes everything else possible.
Read the full article for specific strategies on filtering urgent vs. patient decisions and insights on moving from firefighting to flourishing in leadership.
⚙️ Optimization
Your LinkedIn Featured section is sitting there like prime real estate in Times Square, but most of us are treating it like a storage closet. This Forbes article breaks down why this underused feature could be your secret weapon for attracting clients and building credibility.
"Your Featured section has approximately three times as much real estate as your About. That's because regardless of how long your About is, when someone is checking out your profile, they only see the first few lines. They need to click 'see more' to see your entire About. Featured, on the other hand, shows your most prominent items up front with an easy scroll to see more."
Key Insights:
Location beats content when it comes to visibility—the Featured section sits between your About and Activity sections where every profile visitor will see it. For example, it gets more views than your Experience section since people have to scroll past it to get there.
Visual content performs exponentially better than text, with one minute of video equaling 1.8 million words of impact. Instead of writing another paragraph about your expertise, show a 30-second client testimonial or before-and-after case study.
The carousel format lets you showcase multiple wins simultaneously while rearranging content based on what's most relevant right now. You might feature your latest speaking engagement one week, then swap it for a viral post or new downloadable resource the next.
Read the full article for 12 specific types of content to feature, including templates for video bios and strategies for showcasing client transformations.
⏲️ Time Management
Those guilty feelings about taking breaks or going for walks during work hours? They're based on outdated thinking about productivity. This Fast Company piece introduces the MTR framework that reframes movement, thinking, and rest as essential productivity tools rather than time-wasters.
"Play often happens in liminal spaces, meaning those ambiguous, in-between times and environments where creativity thrives. These are undefined, transitional periods, such as daydreaming, micro-retreats, or those moments when you're half-awake in the morning... 2023 research from MIT on Targeted Dream Incubation underscores the power of these liminal states. The study found that participants who received specific task prompts before napping produced more creative stories and performed better on divergent thinking tasks."
Key Insights:
The MTR framework treats Move, Think, and Rest as your productivity engine rather than obstacles to getting work done. For example, taking walking meetings or scheduling 90-second daydream breaks actually seeds innovative ideas that wouldn't emerge from continuous desk work.
Cultivation beats traditional productivity metrics by valuing both visible outputs and the percolating work happening beneath the surface. Like a garden where plants sometimes need to go dormant to emerge stronger next season, your best ideas often come from apparent downtime.
Companies implementing MTR see breakthrough results through intentional "unproductive" time. Spotify's squad model regularly rotates team members for fresh perspectives, while Meta offers sabbaticals after five years specifically to prevent burnout and spark innovation.
Read the full article for specific implementation strategies at individual, team, and organizational levels, plus insights from 60+ interviews with leaders using MTR principles.
💻 Tools & Technology
Your text messages are probably a chaotic mix of OTPs, bank alerts, and actual conversations buried somewhere in between. This Android Police article reveals how to transform any messaging app into a surprisingly powerful organizational tool—and the tagging trick alone is worth the read.
"In group chats, I've developed a habit of tagging my own messages. If someone drops a task or an update that I need to act on, I'll reply underneath with a short tag like 'to-do.' Group chats are full of overlapping jokes and side comments. It might be tough to recall exact phrasings when searching later. So, I search for my tag, and Google Messages pulls up every marked item."
Key Insights:
Create your own keyword tagging system by replying to important messages with searchable tags like "to-do" or "idea"—this works with any messaging app, not just Google Messages. For example, weaving it naturally into a sentence like "this just gave me an idea" makes it searchable without looking robotic.
Schedule messages to yourself as time-sensitive reminders that feel more urgent than calendar alerts because they arrive like real texts. Set them to land exactly when you need them, especially useful when switching between work and personal devices.
Use archiving strategically to hide conversations that don't need immediate attention while keeping them searchable and accessible. If an archived conversation becomes active again, it automatically reappears in your inbox without manual intervention.
Read the full article for eight specific organizational techniques including subject headlines, star systems, and using AI for quick calculations and message drafting.
🤖 AI
The CEO of a $10 billion AI startup just revealed why he only charges clients when his AI successfully completes a task—and why he thinks we're living through both an AI bubble and revolution simultaneously.
"Big companies have big problems... For most consumer brands, their average revenue per user is less than that phone call. So you literally can't afford to have a conversation. It's why if you've ever tried to call any consumer brand, you'll find you can't... Now with large language models, that's totally different. You bring down the cost of a phone call by not one but two orders of magnitude, and all of a sudden the economics of having a conversation change dramatically."
Key Insights:
Sierra charges only for successful outcomes—when AI resolves a customer issue, there's a fee, but if it transfers to a human, it's free. Taylor believes this outcome-based pricing will become standard for AI agents because you're paying for a job completed, not just software access.
Voice is already bigger than text on Sierra's platform, launched just last November, because AI has transformed phone calls from the most expensive customer service channel to a digital one. Companies that used to push customers to websites now welcome phone conversations handled by the same AI agent.
Taylor sees direct parallels to the internet bubble where massive value creation and spectacular failures happened simultaneously. He believes AI will transform the economy like the internet did, but warns that many will lose money while others create companies as valuable as Amazon and Google.
Read the full article for Taylor's perspective on why the AI models aren't plateauing like some think, how agents are already refinancing homes autonomously, and why he believes every business domain will get its own specialized AI agent company.
🎉 Celebration Corner
Every week Doers Inner Circle members do a weekly review & get help when they need it — check out the progress they made this week!
A productive week with all the goals completed.
Delivered a speech with slides — and got great feedback.
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Wishing you much productivity!
- Jenae :)
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