Here’s my very biased take: doing is rarely the real drain. Indecision is.
Most people think the hard part is the work. They look at someone grinding away, putting in the hours, staying up late, pushing through difficult tasks, and they think: That must be exhausting. And sure, it can be. But that exhaustion has a limit. It has a finish line. You finish the project, you solve the problem, you go to sleep. The energy you spent is gone, but so is the thing that was consuming your attention.
The real energy vampire isn’t action. It’s what happens before you act.
It’s the hour you spend staring at your inbox, wondering whether to send that email or wait for a better time.
It’s the week you spend mentally rehearsing the conversation with your boss, imagining every possible outcome, preparing for every objection, and still not saying a word.
It’s the month you spend trying to decide whether to pivot your career, researching every option, talking to every friend, printing out pros-and-cons lists, and then… going to bed and doing the same thing tomorrow.
That’s not preparation. That’s paralysis disguised as due diligence.
And here’s the thing most people don’t realize: indecision has a compounding cost. Every hour you spend not deciding is an hour of mental bandwidth consumed. Your brain doesn’t get to move on to the next thing. It holds that open loop, that unresolved question, in the background. It churns. It worries. It plays out scenarios you’ll never actually live through.
By the time you finally decide to act? You’re already exhausted. And you haven’t done a damn thing.
I’ve seen this in myself. In the early days of building my career, I spent way too long trying to decide the “right” move. Should I write about this or that? Should I take this opportunity or wait for a better one? Should I launch now or polish more? The time spent deliberating was more draining than the actual execution.
When I finally just did something—anything—the relief was immediate. The weight lifted. Even if the outcome wasn’t perfect, the cognitive load of decision-making vanished.
Let’s look at the numbers. A well-known study on decision fatigue found that the average person makes about 35,000 decisions a day. If 20% of them involve any level of internal conflict or delay—decisions you defer or agonize over—that’s 7,000 micro-drains on your cognitive reserve. Over a week, that’s nearly 50,000 unresolved decisions sitting in your mental queue, each one quietly burning energy.
Compare that to someone who just chooses. They might pick the wrong thing 30% of the time. But the 70% of decisions they make quickly free up enough energy to course-correct later. The cost of being wrong is lower than the cost of being frozen.
Steve Jobs famously wore the same black turtleneck every day. Not because he had bad taste. Because he understood that small decisions—what to wear, what to eat—compound into exhaustion. He wanted to save his mental energy for the decisions that mattered.
Most of us don’t have that discipline. We agonize over which coffee shop to work from, which podcast to listen to, which email client to use. We turn trivial choices into major life dilemmas. And then we wonder why we feel drained by 2 PM.
If you want to test this for yourself, try a simple experiment: for one week, make every decision under 60 seconds. No deliberating. No research. No asking five friends for opinions. Just pick, commit, and move forward.
The result? You’ll have an extra 2–3 hours per day of pure cognitive energy. Energy you can spend on actual output, not on mental wheel-spinning.
You’ll also discover something uncomfortable: most of the decisions you treat as high-stakes are actually low-risk. The fear was never about the decision itself. It was about the feeling of not knowing.
The faster you can make that feeling go away—by deciding—the faster you can get back to doing.
And the less time you spend doing nothing in your own head, the less exhausted you’ll feel.
Stop treating indecision as a form of carefulness. It’s not. It’s the most wasteful activity you engage in, day after day. You burn the same energy as a full day’s work, but you have nothing to show for it.
So make the damn decision. Make it fast. Make it imperfect. Just make it.
The relief you feel will tell you everything you need to know.