Decision Fatigue in High Performers — The Complete Guide

The decision you made at 9pm — and why it was probably wrong

You have been in back-to-back meetings since eight in the morning. You have answered forty-seven emails, reviewed three presentations, navigated two difficult conversations and made somewhere between sixty and two hundred decisions — most of them small, several of them not. It is now nine in the evening. You have one more thing to look at before you can leave: a term sheet, a hiring decision, a strategic question that has been waiting all day for your attention.

You read it. You think about it. You make a call.

Here is what is almost certainly true: that call was worse than the one you would have made at nine in the morning. Not because you are less intelligent at nine in the evening. Not because the problem was more complex. But because the organ you were using to make it — your brain — had been processing decisions continuously for thirteen hours, and it was running on severely depleted resources.

This is decision fatigue. And it is one of the most expensive, least discussed and most consistently underestimated problems in high-performance professional environments.

The research on this is not soft or speculative. In a landmark study of judges making parole decisions, researchers found that judges granted parole 65 percent of the time early in the day. Later in the day, that number dropped to nearly zero — returning to 65 percent only after a food break. The cause was not bias, not case complexity, not the nature of the crimes. It was cognitive depletion. The judges were not making worse decisions because they were worse judges in the afternoon. They were making worse decisions because they had used up the cognitive resources that good decision-making requires.

If this happens to trained legal professionals making consequential decisions with significant personal accountability — what do you think is happening in your firm, your fund, your company, on a typical Tuesday at six in the evening?

What decision fatigue actually is — the science

Decision fatigue is the decline in the quality and consistency of decisions that occurs after a prolonged period of decision-making. It was brought into academic prominence by Roy Baumeister, the social psychologist whose concept of ego depletion demonstrated in repeated experiments that willpower and decision-making share a common cognitive resource — and that resource is finite.

The mechanism works like this. Each decision you make — regardless of its apparent size or complexity — draws on the same pool of cognitive energy. The decision about which meeting to attend draws from the same pool as the decision about whether to proceed with an acquisition. The decision about what to have for lunch draws from the same pool as the decision about how to respond to a difficult investor. The brain does not distinguish between trivial and consequential. It simply depletes.

As that pool depletes over the course of a decision-heavy day, the brain begins to take shortcuts. It defaults to familiar patterns. It becomes more risk-averse — or, paradoxically, more impulsive, choosing the path of least resistance simply to stop the cognitive effort of deliberation. It becomes more susceptible to the framing of choices presented to it. It loses the nuance and flexibility that good judgment requires.

What makes decision fatigue particularly insidious is that it does not feel like fatigue in the way physical exhaustion does. You do not feel tired. You feel like you are still thinking clearly, still engaged, still capable. The subjective experience of making decisions does not reliably signal the objective decline in their quality. Which means that the most depleted moments are often the moments when you feel most certain you are thinking clearly — because the capacity for self-assessment is itself one of the first things to go.

The neuroscience

The prefrontal cortex — the region of the brain responsible for complex decision-making, weighing competing options, impulse control and long-term thinking — is the primary seat of the kind of deliberate, high-quality decision-making that senior professionals need to exercise consistently. It is also the region most sensitive to cognitive depletion.

When the prefrontal cortex is depleted, decision-making shifts toward older, more reactive brain regions — particularly the basal ganglia, which handles habitual and automatic responses, and the amygdala, which processes threat and emotion. Roy Baumeister demonstrated in repeated experiments that willpower and decision-making share a common energy source. People who were asked to resist eating cookies performed significantly worse on subsequent problem-solving tasks. The cookie-resisters were not stupider. They were just spent.

The practical implication of this neurological reality is that the decisions you make at the end of a demanding day are not just less considered — they are being made by a qualitatively different cognitive system than the one you are using at the beginning. The depleted brain is not a slower version of the fresh brain. It is a different brain, with different tendencies, different biases, and a different relationship to risk and complexity.

The circadian dimension

Decision fatigue does not operate independently of the body's natural rhythms. Research published in the journal Sleep has documented a natural circadian trough in alertness that occurs between roughly 1pm and 3pm, independent of whether you have eaten. When you layer genuine decision fatigue on top of this biological dip, the result is a window where senior professionals are neurologically at their worst — and still, in most high-performance environments, scheduling consequential meetings and conversations.

The post-lunch performance trough is not a personal failing or a sign of insufficient discipline. It is a biological reality that applies to every human nervous system regardless of how motivated, capable or professionally accomplished the person attached to it is. The professionals who navigate it most effectively are not those who override it through force of will — they are those who design their days to work with it rather than against it.

Why high performers are the most vulnerable

There is a specific paradox at the heart of decision fatigue in high-performance environments: the qualities that make someone a high performer are often precisely the qualities that make them most susceptible to decision fatigue.

The volume problem

High performers make more decisions than most people. Not just more consequential decisions — more decisions in total. They are typically responsible for more people, more projects, more competing priorities. They are consulted more, deferred to more, asked to weigh in on more things. The volume of decision-making that a managing director, a fund partner or a founder faces in a typical week is genuinely extraordinary — and it accumulates its depletion effects whether or not the individual decisions feel important.

The standards problem

High performers hold themselves to high standards. They are less likely than average performers to take cognitive shortcuts, to delegate decisions they feel they should make themselves, or to accept a good-enough answer when a better one might be available with more thought. These are, in many contexts, excellent qualities. In the context of decision fatigue, they are vulnerabilities — because they ensure that the cognitive resources available are being expended more thoroughly, more consistently, and with less recovery time than for people with lower standards.

The availability problem

Senior professionals are expected to be available. The culture in finance particularly — but in high-performance professional environments more broadly — rewards and expects a kind of continuous cognitive availability that is fundamentally incompatible with the brain's need for recovery between demanding cognitive tasks. The executive who is always reachable, always responsive, always willing to engage with another question or another problem, is the executive who is systematically depleting their decision-making capacity faster than it can recover.

The identity problem

Many high performers have built their professional identity around their ability to think clearly under pressure, to make good calls when it matters, to be the person in the room who is never cognitively overwhelmed. Acknowledging decision fatigue — even internally — feels like acknowledging a limitation that should not exist. So rather than managing it, they push through it. And the pushing through, rather than solving the problem, makes it substantially worse.

Decision fatigue in private equity — when the stakes are highest

Private equity produces a variant of decision fatigue that is, in certain respects, more consequential than the banking version — because the decisions being made under conditions of cognitive depletion carry larger individual stakes and longer time horizons.

A poor decision in banking typically affects a transaction. A poor decision in private equity — a misjudged investment thesis, a missed red flag in due diligence, a flawed assessment of a management team — can affect the returns of an entire fund, the livelihoods of the companies in that portfolio, and the professional reputations of everyone involved. The stakes make the quality of the decision-making more important. And the environment makes consistently high-quality decision-making very difficult to sustain.

The due diligence marathon

Due diligence processes in PE are cognitively exhausting by design — they need to be. They involve processing enormous volumes of information, assessing complex businesses across multiple dimensions simultaneously, and maintaining consistent judgment across weeks of intensive work. The problem is that the intensity of that process systematically depletes the cognitive resources of the people conducting it — precisely as those people are being asked to make the most consequential judgments of the entire investment cycle.

The decision to invest or not invest — the decision that most directly determines whether a fund performs — is typically made at the end of a due diligence process during which the decision-makers have been continuously depleted. The fresh eyes that would most benefit the final call are not available. The team is tired, the deadline is real, and the momentum of the process creates its own pressure toward a conclusion.

The portfolio pressure

Beyond individual investment decisions, PE partners carry a continuous cognitive load from their portfolio companies. Each portfolio company has its own demands — its own management dynamics, its own performance questions, its own crises and opportunities. A partner with eight portfolio companies is carrying eight ongoing streams of complex judgment, each of which generates decision demands that accumulate through the week.

The research on cognitive load suggests that the brain's capacity for complex judgment is not only depleted by active decision-making but by the maintenance of multiple complex situations in working memory simultaneously. The partner who is tracking eight portfolio companies is not just tired from the decisions they have made. They are cognitively burdened by the continuous background processing that managing eight complex situations requires — even in the moments between explicit decisions.

The investment committee

Investment committee meetings deserve specific attention in the context of decision fatigue, because they represent a particularly acute version of the problem. IC meetings are typically scheduled at specific times — often in the middle of the week, often in the afternoon, often following a morning of other meetings and obligations. The people in those meetings are often substantially depleted before the meeting begins. And the culture of IC meetings — which typically rewards confident, decisive presentation over tentative or exploratory thinking — creates social pressure to perform decisiveness regardless of the actual quality of the underlying cognition.

The result, in many cases, is decisions that look decisive and feel confident but were made by cognitively depleted people performing confidence they did not fully feel, in a format that made it difficult to acknowledge or compensate for that depletion. The decisions survive because the performance was convincing. The quality of the underlying thinking was, in many cases, substantially lower than it would have been at nine in the morning by the same people.

Decision fatigue for founders — when you are the only one who can decide

Founders face a specific and particularly brutal version of decision fatigue, for reasons that are structural rather than incidental. In a large organisation, decisions can be distributed — delegated, delayed, shared across a leadership team with different cognitive loads and different recovery patterns. For founders, particularly in the early stages of building, this distribution is often not available. The decision comes to them because there is nobody else for it to go to. And the decisions keep coming, regardless of whether the cognitive resources to handle them well have recovered.

The context-switching cost

Founders are typically required to switch contexts at a pace and frequency that is cognitively extremely expensive. In a single morning, a founder might be required to think about product roadmap, then investor relations, then a team conflict, then a customer complaint, then a financial model, then a hiring decision. Each context switch — each transition from one domain of thinking to another — carries a cognitive cost. The brain does not simply stop processing one context and start fresh with the next. It carries residue. It takes time to fully engage with the new domain. And that transition cost is multiplied by the number of switches in a day.

Research on context switching suggests that each significant transition between different cognitive domains — not just different tasks, but different kinds of thinking — reduces effective cognitive capacity for the subsequent task by a meaningful amount. A founder who switches contexts twenty times before noon has, in effect, used up a significant portion of their daily cognitive budget before they have made a single explicitly deliberate decision.

The emotional decision load

Founders face a category of decisions that most senior professionals in large organisations are partly buffered from: decisions with direct, personal emotional stakes. The decision about whether to let a founding team member go — someone you hired, someone who has worked enormously hard, someone whose family depends on the income you are considering removing. The decision about whether to take an investment that will permanently dilute your ownership of something you built. The decision about whether to shut down a product that your team has poured themselves into.

These decisions are not just cognitively demanding. They are emotionally demanding in a way that draws on the same cognitive resources as purely analytical decisions — and often more so. The emotional processing required to make a genuinely difficult human decision is not separable from the cognitive processing. It depletes the same pool. And founders face a higher proportion of these emotionally weighted decisions than most other professionals in comparably senior roles.

The alone-at-the-top problem

One of the most effective tools for managing decision fatigue is what researchers call decision distribution — the deliberate sharing of decision-making across multiple people, so that no single individual carries the full cognitive weight of all the decisions a situation requires. Leadership teams, advisory boards, and strong management structures all serve, in part, this cognitive function. They distribute the load.

Founders, particularly in the early stages, often do not have effective mechanisms for this distribution. The team is junior. The advisors are not available continuously. The investors have their own perspective but not always the operational context to genuinely share the cognitive burden. The founder is, in a very real sense, alone with the decisions — which means alone with the fatigue that accumulates from making them.

The hidden cost — what decision fatigue actually costs at the top

The costs of decision fatigue are rarely visible in the way that other performance problems are. You can see when a deal goes wrong. You can see when a presentation fails. You can see when a hire turns out badly. What you almost never see — what is almost never attributed correctly — is the role that cognitive depletion played in producing the outcome that is now visible as a failure.

The cost to decision quality

The most direct cost is straightforward: depleted decision-makers make worse decisions. Not catastrophically worse in most cases — but consistently, measurably worse. More likely to default to familiar patterns rather than genuinely considering alternatives. More likely to accept the first adequate option rather than seeking the best available one. More likely to be influenced by how a choice is framed rather than its actual content. More likely to be risk-averse in ways that serve the desire to stop deliberating rather than the actual risk profile of the situation.

In a profession where the difference between a good decision and an excellent one is measured in hundreds of basis points, in millions of pounds, in the trajectory of companies and funds and careers — the consistent production of adequate-rather-than-excellent decisions is not a minor inefficiency. It is a significant and systematic drag on performance.

The cost to relationships

Decision fatigue does not just affect the quality of explicit decisions. It affects the quality of every interaction during which a depleted person is making the continuous micro-decisions that social engagement requires — how to respond to this comment, how to interpret that expression, whether to push back on this assertion or let it pass. Fatigued leaders are more likely to communicate unclearly, delay decisions, avoid conflict resolution, and default to risk-averse or inconsistent policies. This ambiguity trickles down to teams, driving frustration, lowered morale and increased stress among employees.

The depleted version of a senior leader — less patient, less empathetic, less capable of the kind of attentive presence that good leadership requires — is not a different person. It is the same person, operating from a depleted cognitive state. But the experience of working with that depleted version, for the people who report to them or work alongside them, is substantially different. And the cumulative effect of those interactions on team culture, on trust, on the quality of working relationships — is real and significant and rarely attributed to its actual cause.

The cost to reputation

The decisions that damage reputations — the unguarded comment in a meeting, the aggressive response to a reasonable challenge, the judgment call that turns out, in retrospect, to have been obviously wrong — are disproportionately made in states of cognitive depletion. Not always. But the correlation between depleted states and decisions that people later regret or that others later remember unfavourably is not coincidental. The impulse control, the social calibration, the capacity to consider how a response will be received before making it — all of these are prefrontal cortex functions, and all of them are among the first to go when cognitive resources are depleted.

How decision fatigue shows up — six patterns

1. Decision avoidance. The decision that keeps being deferred. The email that sits in the draft folder for days. The hire that keeps getting delayed, the strategy question that keeps being kicked to the next meeting. Decision avoidance is the brain's most reliable response to depleted cognitive resources — if making the decision costs cognitive energy that is not available, the brain finds ways not to make it. In high-performance environments, where decisiveness is culturally valued, this avoidance is often disguised as strategic patience, further review, or the need for more information. Sometimes those reasons are genuine. Often they are the cognitive economy of the depleted brain finding a plausible narrative for what is actually avoidance.
2. Impulsive decisiveness. The opposite of decision avoidance, and equally a product of depletion. The decision made quickly and with apparent confidence not because the situation is clear but because the cognitive cost of further deliberation has become intolerable. The depleted brain sometimes chooses speed not because speed serves the situation but because stopping the deliberation — any stopping — provides relief. These impulsive decisions often feel confident and even righteous in the moment. They are among the most likely to be regretted.
3. Default to status quo. When decision quality declines, the path of least resistance is to do what was done before — to repeat the familiar rather than genuinely evaluating whether the familiar is actually the best available option. The status quo bias that exists at full cognitive capacity becomes substantially stronger when resources are depleted. New options, novel approaches, departures from established patterns — all of these require more cognitive effort than repetition. And when cognitive resources are scarce, the brain economises by choosing the familiar.
4. Increased susceptibility to framing. The quality of genuinely good decision-making includes the ability to assess a choice based on its actual content rather than the way it is presented. This capacity — to see through framing to the underlying substance — is cognitively expensive. When resources are depleted, decisions become much more susceptible to how options are presented. The same investment opportunity, framed as a chance to secure a significant return rather than a risk of losing capital, will be assessed differently by a depleted decision-maker than a fresh one — even when the underlying risk-return profile is identical.
5. Reduced risk tolerance. Depleted decision-makers tend to become more risk-averse — not because the risk profile of situations has changed, but because processing risk genuinely requires cognitive resources, and when those resources are scarce, the brain prefers certainty. This risk aversion is not rational in the sense of being calibrated to actual risk. It is a symptom of depletion. In a profession where appropriate risk-taking is core to value creation, systematic depletion-driven risk aversion is a meaningful drag on performance.
6. Shortened time horizon. Good strategic thinking requires the capacity to hold multiple time horizons simultaneously — to consider the immediate implications of a decision alongside its medium-term and long-term effects. This simultaneous multi-horizon processing is cognitively expensive. When resources are depleted, thinking shortens. The depleted brain focuses on the immediate, the concrete, the proximate consequence — and does less of the longer-horizon thinking that distinguishes genuinely strategic judgment from reactive decision-making.

What does not work — and why common advice misses the point

Most advice about decision fatigue focuses on either time management or willpower. Make fewer decisions. Schedule better. Try harder to focus. These suggestions are not wrong, exactly, but they miss the structural reality of how decision fatigue operates in high-performance professional environments — and they consistently underestimate what the problem actually requires.

Working harder does not work. The instinct of most high performers when they notice their cognitive performance declining is to increase effort — to push through the fatigue rather than accommodate it. This is understandable given the cultures most of them operate in, and it is genuinely counterproductive. Increased effort does not restore depleted cognitive resources. It accelerates the depletion. The person who pushes through decision fatigue rather than managing it is not demonstrating resilience — they are systematically degrading the quality of their decision-making while generating the subjective experience of maintaining it.

More information does not work. A related instinct is to seek more information before deciding — to delay the decision until the fog clears, until enough data is available to feel confident. For decisions that are genuinely information-limited, this is sometimes appropriate. But for decisions that are being avoided because of cognitive depletion rather than genuine information gaps, seeking more information does not address the actual problem. It delays the decision, adds to the cognitive load of the ongoing situation, and often produces a decision made under exactly the same conditions of depletion, just later.

Generic time management techniques do not work. The productivity industry has produced an enormous volume of advice about scheduling, prioritisation and decision frameworks that contains genuine wisdom but consistently fails to account for the specific conditions of high-performance professional environments. The advice to make your most important decisions in the morning is correct — and almost entirely inapplicable to the reality of a banking or PE professional whose most important decisions are often determined by deal timelines, client needs and market conditions rather than by their own cognitive resource management preferences.

Caffeine does not work — not in the way people hope. Caffeine is one of the most widely used tools for managing perceived cognitive fatigue in high-performance environments. It is reasonably effective at managing the subjective feeling of tiredness. It is considerably less effective at restoring the specific cognitive capacities — nuanced judgment, complex reasoning, appropriate risk assessment — that decision fatigue impairs. The caffeinated but depleted professional often feels more alert. They are not making better decisions.

What actually works — the architecture of good decision-making

The most effective responses to decision fatigue are not individual techniques or productivity hacks. They are structural changes to how decision-making is organised, distributed and protected — changes that work with the brain's actual resource constraints rather than pretending those constraints do not exist.

Decision architecture — design before you are depleted

The single most effective tool for managing decision fatigue is designing your decision-making environment before you are in it — creating structures that reduce the number of decisions you need to make from scratch, reduce the cognitive cost of the decisions you cannot avoid, and protect the resource windows when your decision-making is most capable.

This is what the most effective senior professionals actually do — though they often do it intuitively rather than explicitly. They develop standing frameworks for recurring categories of decisions, so that each instance does not require full deliberation from first principles. They delegate genuinely and completely — not delegating the task while retaining the decision, but delegating both. They create default positions for low-stakes choices, so that the brain does not expend resources on questions that do not warrant them.

The purpose of decision architecture is not to make you more productive in the conventional sense. It is to ensure that the limited cognitive resources available for genuinely high-quality decision-making are not being consumed by the wrong decisions.

Temporal protection — guarding the resource windows

Cognitive resources are not uniformly available throughout the day. Most people — with some individual variation — have a peak window of two to four hours in the morning when the prefrontal cortex is operating at full capacity. Protecting that window for the decisions that most require full capacity is one of the highest-leverage changes available to most senior professionals.

In practice, this means being deliberate about what occupies the morning hours. Administrative meetings, status updates, routine email — all of these can be moved to times when cognitive resources are less critical. The consequential decisions — the investment judgment, the strategic direction, the difficult leadership conversation — should be front-loaded wherever possible. Not because you will never make good decisions at other times, but because the probability of making excellent ones is substantially higher when the resources are fresh.

For most high-performance professionals, this requires a genuine renegotiation of how their calendar is managed — including explicit conversations with the people who book their time about why certain morning windows need to be protected. That renegotiation has a cost. The alternative — continuing to make your most important decisions with the most depleted version of your cognitive capacity — has a higher one.

Recovery as performance — not rest as weakness

The cultural prohibition on visible recovery in most high-performance environments is one of the most expensive norms in professional life. The implicit message — that pausing, stepping back, taking a walk, eating lunch properly — is a sign of insufficient commitment or insufficient capability, means that the very behaviours most likely to restore cognitive resources are the behaviours most systematically suppressed by the cultures that most need them.

The research on recovery is consistent and unambiguous: brief, genuine recovery periods during the working day restore cognitive capacity meaningfully. Not metaphorically. Not as a self-care nicety. As a measurable, neurological reality. The Israeli judges whose parole grant rates dropped to near zero before lunch returned to 65 percent after a food break. The resource was restored. The decision quality followed.

For senior professionals in demanding environments, treating recovery as a performance tool — rather than as rest from performance — is both a cognitive and a cultural shift. It requires reframing what recovery means, why it matters, and what it produces. It requires resisting the cultural pressure to perform continuous availability. And it requires accepting, at least privately, that the version of yourself that makes decisions after genuine recovery is a meaningfully different — and better — decision-maker than the version that pushes through.

Decision distribution — sharing the cognitive load

One of the most effective structural changes available to senior leaders is the genuine distribution of decision-making — not the delegation of tasks while retaining decisions, but the actual transfer of decision authority to capable people at appropriate levels. This serves the decision quality of the organisation in two ways simultaneously: it ensures that more decisions are being made by people with fresh cognitive resources, and it reduces the cognitive load of the senior leader to the decisions that genuinely require their level of judgment.

Most senior professionals delegate less than they believe they do, and far less than they could. The reasons are understandable — concern about quality, difficulty in trusting others' judgment, the speed advantage of making decisions themselves. But the cognitive cost of retaining decision authority across the full scope of what a senior role involves is one of the primary drivers of the depletion that makes the most important decisions worse. The senior professional who delegates genuinely and completely is not abdicating responsibility. They are managing their cognitive resources intelligently — ensuring that the decisions that genuinely require their full capacity actually receive it.

Pre-mortems — deciding when you are fresh about how to decide when you are not

One of the most powerful tools for managing decision fatigue is the pre-mortem — a deliberate, forward-looking exercise in which you identify, in advance and while fresh, the specific conditions under which you are most likely to make poor decisions, and design responses to those conditions before you are in them.

In practice, this might mean deciding — at nine in the morning, when you are at full capacity — that you will not make significant financial decisions after eight in the evening without sleeping on them. Or that you will not make major hiring or firing decisions on the day of a difficult board meeting. Or that you will flag to a trusted colleague when you have been in back-to-back meetings for more than four hours and ask for a second opinion on any consequential call that falls in that window.

The pre-mortem approach works because it uses your best cognitive capacity to design guardrails for your worst. The rules are set when you are most capable of setting them well. The implementation happens automatically, without requiring the depleted state to recognise itself as depleted — which, as we have established, it typically cannot do.

Physical foundations — the non-negotiables

The neurological research on cognitive performance is unambiguous on a set of basic physical variables that most senior professionals in high-performance environments systematically neglect. Sleep is the most consequential. Sleep deprivation impairs prefrontal cortex function — the specific cognitive capacity most relevant to decision quality — more severely and more persistently than almost any other common variable. A professional who is consistently sleeping six hours or fewer is not a high performer managing on less sleep. They are a person whose decision-making capacity is significantly and consistently impaired relative to what it would be with adequate sleep.

Exercise, hydration and nutrition are less dramatic in their individual effects but cumulatively significant. The research consistently shows that aerobic exercise in particular supports prefrontal cortex function and cognitive resilience. The professional who has replaced exercise with additional working hours is not trading recovery for productivity. They are trading a significant cognitive performance asset for the subjective feeling of doing more — which, for decisions made in a depleted state, may actually mean doing less.

The role of coaching — when structural changes are not enough

Structural changes to decision-making — decision architecture, temporal protection, genuine delegation, recovery practices — address the external conditions that produce and amplify decision fatigue. They are necessary. For most high performers, they are not sufficient.

Because decision fatigue does not operate only at the structural level. It operates at the level of identity, values and the specific patterns of thinking and behaviour that make certain structural changes feel impossible to implement even when their value is clearly understood.

The senior professional who intellectually understands that they should protect their morning hours — but whose identity is built around being always available, always responsive, always the person who is first in and last out — will not successfully protect those hours through information alone. The founder who knows they should delegate more but whose sense of the business as an extension of themselves makes delegation feel like abandonment — will not delegate more through technique alone. The banker who recognises their decision quality declining at nine in the evening but whose culture treats leaving the office as disloyalty — will not leave the office through willpower alone.

The changes that genuinely address decision fatigue at its deepest level require working on the beliefs, identities and cultural assumptions that make the structural changes feel threatening rather than enabling. That is coaching work — not technique delivery, but genuine engagement with why the person is currently organised the way they are, and what it would take for them to be organised differently.

The clients I work with on decision fatigue — the MDs, the PE partners, the founders — are not, in most cases, lacking information about how to manage their cognitive resources better. They are operating in cultures, and often from identities, that make managing those resources feel impossible or unacceptable. The work is not to tell them what to do. It is to work on what makes doing it difficult.

Frequently asked questions