How many decisions did you make yesterday?
Not just the big ones that you remember immediately—but also the small ones that you might not even realize you made until you read the next paragraph.
Whether to hit snooze. What to wear. What to eat for breakfast—or whether to eat breakfast at all. What to listen to in the car. Which email to answer first. Where to go for lunch. Whether to stop at the store on the way home. Whether you have enough energy to exercise. What to eat for dinner. What to watch, read, or do afterward. When to go to bed.
I have no idea what my number is. I doubt you know yours either.
But the specific number isn’t really the point anyway. The point is that most of those decisions got made without you really noticing—and every one of them was a chance to take the easy option.
A few weeks ago on a hike with the TNT Adventure Club, someone asked me what I eat for dinner.
My answer was: more or less the same things. And not only at dinner.
In general: meat, eggs, fruit, Greek yogurt, cheese, vegetables, sweet potatoes, rice, Kodiak (high protein and fiber) pancakes. Dinner is usually one of five or six options—chicken curry; a steak, burger, turkey burger or chicken breast with a microwaved sweet potato and some raw veggies with hummus; a turkey taco bowl; salmon and brussels sprouts; baked white fish with tomatoes and rice. When the weather turns, white chili and squash rotate in.
Obviously other meals sometimes get thrown into the mix—but those are the staples that I eat 95% of the time.
Eating this way requires very little discipline. I’m not white-knuckling my way past a takeout menu every night. What to eat, in general, and dinner, specifically, simply stopped being major decisions I make. Instead they’ve become a short list I choose from—which is the same plug-and-play approach I wrote about years ago.
Now, I’ve already given you the training version of this. I’ve suggested treating your sessions like appointments by putting them on your calendar and making getting started easier by making pre-decisions when your motivation is highest.
What I didn’t say in either tip is that the aim isn’t exactly to get better at making tough decisions—it’s to have fewer of them to make in the first place. In terms of training, settling when you train—“Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 6 AM” or “weekdays at noon”, for example—eliminates the need to make several other decisions: which day/time instead, is there enough time, am I up for it, is this week already shot.
We tend to assume that more options is better. But every option left open is one more chance to renegotiate—and enough small renegotiations, each one nudging toward the easier choice, may add up to an outcome you didn’t want.
And that brings me to the other part I haven’t previously discussed, which is where things seem to fall apart for many people.
Variety or results
Whenever I describe how I eat or schedule training, I’ll often hear some version of the reply: I’d go crazy. I need variety.
That’s a fair objection—and I have two easy answers before asking a hard question.
First, the variety is still there—it’s just spread across the day and week rather than stuffed into every slot. Each dinner (or meal, in general) varies from the one before or after. And any particular meal isn’t tied to a specific day, but is simply an option that can be quickly assembled on short notice. Training works the same way: a fixed schedule doesn’t mean a fixed session. (Which is why I’ve explained that consistency doesn’t necessarily mean doing the same thing. What stays fixed is the frame. What changes is what goes inside it.)
And second, it’s not actually boring, because I enjoy everything on my list. If your staples are foods you’re choking down or sessions you dread, you haven’t built something low-maintenance—you’ve built a punishment system that won’t survive over the long haul. (There’s a reason the post title for that curry recipe says that it’s “anything but boring.”)
But those are my easy answers, and they don’t get to the heart of the issue. So here’s the harder question, and it’s one each of us has to answer for ourselves:
Which do you actually want more—variety or results?
Both are perfectly acceptable options—but they each come with their own caveats.
If variety is what you’re after, you can still get where you want to go. But you need to accept that the trip might (i.e. probably will) be slower and require more focus and mental effort on your part. (Not doing so is like taking the scenic route but complaining that the drive was twice as long.)
If results are more important to you, then you may have to initially put up with some boredom—at least until what you’re doing becomes a normal part of your routine. Although in my experience, both the boredom and its duration tend to be a lot less than many people expect—because progress turns out to be reasonably interesting on its own.
But calling that a trade (variety for results) only holds if you’re looking at your training or nutrition—or any other single area—by itself. The real benefit shows up in more than one place.
What fewer decisions actually buys you
Let’s start with the obvious part: When there are fewer decisions on the table, the ones you kept get more attention—and that’s most of what consistency actually is in practice. Not gritting your teeth harder, just having less to negotiate.
But there’s a second part that I think matters more: The deliberation you’re no longer spending on whether to train Thursday or what to eat tonight doesn’t evaporate. It goes somewhere else—and you get to decide where that is.
Look back at the list from the beginning of this tip. Some of those decisions (and others) you may genuinely enjoy making—what to cook when you do feel like cooking, what to read next, where to go on an extended weekend. Others you’d hand off tomorrow if you could (ahem, email).
Putting the boring (but still important) parts of life—like fitness or nutrition—on autopilot is what allows the more interesting parts to get your attention.
So variety doesn’t actually disappear when you settle your training schedule or dinner options. It moves to the places you wanted it in the first place.
Putting it into practice
Think about the fitness and nutrition corners of your life. Where do you feel like you’re always debating when, whether, or how to do something? And are you more interested in maintaining variety in that area—or seeing results?
If your honest answer is variety, this week’s work is simply to own that and remind yourself that the pace of progress might not be quick.
If your answer is to see results: Is there a single “upstream” decision that you could make that would eliminate a number of “downstream” decisions—even in just a single daily or weekly instance? (For example, “Tuesdays into the foreseeable future shall now be known as ‘Taco Bowl Tuesdays’…”)
Got it? Good—now make that decision and observe what happens over a few weeks. At the least, you should notice that implementing the task feels slightly easier each time you do it and that your attention can be directed at other things. Optimally, you’ll also notice some progress toward your intended goal—and, if not, you’ll get some useful data about what doesn’t seem to move your needle.