Reducing Discipline Fatigue

You make thousands of decisions a day, perhaps more. Most of them are subconscious: rubbing your eyes to wake yourself up; putting your right foot into your pants first to put them on; wetting your toothbrush after putting on toothpaste. Some are semi-conscious: swerving to avoid a pothole, pouring an intuitive amount of creamer into your coffee, pulling out your credit card to pay for your monthly McDonalds splurge. Most of these decisions don’t really demand much energy (unless you have a really hard time at the McDonald’s drive through). The decisions that sap energy away from our lives are those that you must think hard about and oftentimes involve discipline.

How many times have you said to yourself: I am going to wake up early and go to the gym? I’ve said it hundreds of times in my life, and I’ve broken that promise to myself hundreds of times too. It’s not necessarily that you lack discipline; you may be expending your energy for discipline elsewhere on non-essential things that don’t truly require it. Which outfit do I wear? Which water bottle do I bring? What workout am I going to do today? I need to make all these decisions just to get started on my workout, and the culmination of these decisions that I need to make in the morning might lead me simply to say “I’m going to go back to bed.” The same is true with personal finance.

Most people who don’t have a budget receive a paycheck. They spend whatever they spend throughout the month, and every so often, they take whatever cash is in there and put it into savings. Then they complain about not being able to reach their savings goals. If you pay yourself first via automated transfers, then you have no choice but to “survive” on the remainder of the money in your account. Imagine being able to save 20% of your paycheck by simply automating 20% of your paycheck into a savings/investment account each month and automatically investing! You may be thinking that this is the most obvious solution to the problem, but it’s deeper than that: by automating your savings, you eliminate a big discipline action from your life, leaving energy to utilize your discipline somewhere else.

You may be thinking: I don’t need help with discipline! I am so good about it. When was the last time you “had a rough day at work” and needed to unwind with a glass of wine or a bowl of ice cream even though you told yourself no alcohol or sweets? When was the last time you stuck to a plan consistently at your own will (i.e. not a preset work schedule) for 1, 2, or 3 months? When was the last time you treated yourself to something off Amazon because you went to the gym 10 days in a row? Human psychology does not allow the average human to be disciplined 100% of the time. It’s not in our nature. We are creatures of spontaneity and that seek instant gratification. Therefore, let’s ensure that we transfer the responsibility of financial discipline to a computer that can make the decision for us, and use our discipline energy to say no to that second serving of cheesecake. (I love cheesecake, so I get it if you can’t say no.)

Another thing that you can do to reduce discipline fatigue is to have a standard methodology for financial decision-making. Want to go out for dinner but don’t know where? Create a list of restaurants that you want to go to that will bring you value versus going somewhere for convenience. Develop a standard purchasing philosophy for non-essentials by utilizing an incubation period, which takes you out of the impulsive purchase window. For purchases above a certain amount, wait at least 24 hours. For purchases above a higher threshold, wait a week or several weeks. This will force you not to decide in the moment. Not only will it remove most of your impulsive purchases; it will also take away the temptation to make a decision when you are in an impulsive state of mind. Ultimately, reducing the sheer number of choices that you make regarding your finances will help you move towards your goals with more consistency. You can continue to adjust your system as you learn more about your financial habits (investing, spending, saving, etc.). As long as your philosophy is systematic, you can implement it in many different scenarios!