Decision fatigue, according to Dr. Connor Robertson, is often misdiagnosed. Most people treat it as a productivity problem, something to push through with more discipline or stronger focus. Robertson argues it is better understood as a systems problem. The leaders who maintain their judgment quality across a long, demanding day, in his framing, are not more mentally resilient than everyone else. They have simply engineered their environment to require fewer decisions in the first place, by converting recurring judgment calls into rules, defaults, and pre-committed positions well before the moment arrives.
The underlying cost, in Robertson’s account, is not abstract. Every decision draws on a finite cognitive resource, and he points to research suggesting that the quality of decisions made late in the day, or after a long sequence of earlier decisions, is measurably worse than decisions made early and in relative isolation. He is careful to frame this as a
design problem rather than a character flaw. A founder whose judgment noticeably declines by the afternoon is not failing at willpower. Their day is simply structured in a way that depletes the resource judgment depends on.
His first recommended fix is what he calls a decision rule, which converts a recurring judgment call into a pre-committed answer that no longer requires active thought each time it comes up. Robertson offers concrete examples of the form these can take: if a vendor takes more than 48 hours to respond, the business does not move forward. If a project’s scope exceeds a defined threshold without a formal change order, the additional work does not start. If a meeting request arrives without an agenda, it gets declined, and an agenda is requested instead. These rules, in his framing, do not ask a founder to think less. They are what thinking carefully exactly once, with full attention, looks like when it is captured and reused.
To find which decisions are worth converting into rules, Robertson recommends building what he calls a decision inventory. His method is to spend one full week logging every decision made, regardless of how small it seems, and then sorting the resulting list by frequency at the end of the week. Any decision made more than twice in that window becomes a candidate for a rule or a default. He suggests picking the five most frequent and converting each into an explicit, pre-committed position, an exercise he says reduces daily decision load by more than 30 percent for most of the founders he has worked with.
Alongside rules, Robertson treats defaults as a distinct and complementary tool, describing a default as a decision that executes automatically unless someone actively overrides it. His own examples include a default meeting length of 30 minutes unless a longer one is specifically requested, a default response to a new tool request from the team of evaluating it at the next quarterly review rather than immediately, and a default of sleeping for 24 hours on anything involving a financial commitment above a defined threshold. Defaults, in his view, remove the friction of deciding in the moment, and in doing so they protect a founder’s best judgment for the smaller number of decisions that genuinely require it.
What ties both tools together, in Robertson’s framing, is the same underlying principle. Judgment is a limited resource, and the founders who use it well are not the ones who force themselves to exercise more of it. They are the ones who have quietly reduced how often they need to draw on it at all, by deciding things once, carefully, and then letting a rule or a default carry that decision forward automatically.
He is careful to note that this approach is not about removing all spontaneity or reducing every choice to a checklist. The goal, in his framing, is narrower and more specific: identifying the recurring, low-stakes decisions that quietly drain attention across a day, and clearing them out of the way so that genuine judgment is reserved for the handful of decisions each week that actually warrant it. A founder who has systemized the predictable choices, he argues, arrives at the decisions that matter most with more
clarity, not less, precisely because so much of the surrounding noise has already been resolved in advance.
About The Author
Dr. Connor Robertson is an entrepreneur, author, and strategic advisor based in Pittsburgh. He is the founder of Elixir Consulting Group and host of The Prospecting Show. More about his work is available at drconnorrobertson.com.
