What is decision fatigue routine?

Decision fatigue routine is a concept in personal epistemology: Consistent daily routines reduce decision overhead and create reliable output.

Example: You decide to start writing every morning. On Monday you sit down at 7:15 AM, open your laptop, and spend fourteen minutes choosing which project to work on, six minutes adjusting your desk setup, nine minutes debating whether to make coffee first or start drafting, and then eleven minutes scrolling through yesterday's notes trying to recall where you left off. By the time you write your first sentence, it is 7:55. You produce four hundred words before your 8:30 meeting. On Tuesday you try again, but you start at 7:40 because you slept poorly. The same sequence of micro-decisions replays — which project, which setup, coffee or no coffee, where was I — and you produce one hundred and seventy words before the meeting. By Thursday you have given up. The friction was too high. Now imagine a different version. You design a routine: 7:00, desk, coffee already prepared by timer the night before, same project until it ships, open the document to the sentence you highlighted before closing it yesterday. On Monday you write your first word at 7:04. On Tuesday, 7:03. On Wednesday, 7:02. The decisions that consumed forty minutes on the first Monday have been eliminated. They were made once, encoded as a routine, and now they execute automatically. By the end of the first week you have produced three thousand words. By the end of the month, twelve thousand. The routine did not make you more talented. It made your talent available by removing the overhead that stood between intention and action.

This concept is part of Phase 42 (Time Systems) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for time systems.