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Paralyzed by Indecision? Automate your Life

I was listening to the Motley Fool Money podcast from Oct. 10, 2014 and for the interview they had on Daniel Levitin talking about his book on organization. Listen to the podcast for all the details, but what I got out of it was this:

Life is overloaded with decisions and it’s easy to become paralyzed and end up not making any decisions, or bad decisions. The way to avoid this is to automate our lives for the small stuff and leave brain-power for the big stuff that we actually need to be thinking consciously about. I love this way of thinking and actually couldn’t agree more; it really fits in well with frugal living. Here are some ways that I automate my life for the small stuff:

1. I eat the same thing for breakfast everyday: a green smoothie. It’s healthy, delicious and takes about 3 minutes to make. And I often eat a variation of the same thing for lunch (a salad) and dinner (a veggie soup or stew or chili) most days of the week as well. The organic box of veggies that I get delivered to my door each week takes away a lot of grocery store indecision that can happen as well, since I just really don’t have to go that much.

2. My wardrobe is extremely small. I usually just rotate 3 or 4 or 5 things in most cases, so it’s actually something I use essentially no brainpower on. For example, I only have 3 sweaters, which I rotate to wear to work. And, I only have 1 pair of brown work shoes, and one pair of black ones.

3. Investments. I have about 25 companies that I like in my portfolio. I’m happy with all of them and plan to hold them for the foreseeable future. If I have to sell, I’d just go down to 24 or 23 and if I want to buy, I just add money to these 25 positions. Of course, I put a lot of brainpower into deciding those original 25 companies, but it’s kind of on autopilot now.

4. Cat stuff. I just order cat food and litter every few months from the same online store, on the same online site. Sure, maybe another site is 50 cents cheaper, but I just don’t care. I don’t want to have make decisions every time I do this.

This book is by the same author, but it’s not the actual book. For some reason, I couldn’t link to it. But, click here and you should be able to find his book or organization easily enough.

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