What is reduce daily decisions?

Reduce daily decisions is a concept in personal epistemology: Map all the choices you make in a typical day and identify which could be automated or eliminated.

Example: You set an alarm for 6 AM on a Tuesday and decided to track every decision you made from the moment you opened your eyes until you turned off the light that night. By noon, you had counted over two hundred. Not just the big ones — what project to work on, how to handle a difficult email, whether to accept a meeting invitation. The small ones. Which alarm to dismiss and which to snooze. Whether to check your phone before getting out of bed. What to eat for breakfast. Which mug to use. Whether to make coffee or buy it. What to wear. Which route to drive. Where to park. Whether to take the stairs or the elevator. What music to play. When to check email. How to respond to each message. Whether to respond now or later. What to eat for lunch. Where to eat. Whether to go alone or with someone. By 2 PM you stopped counting — not because the decisions stopped, but because tracking them was itself becoming a decision burden. The next morning you looked at the list and a pattern emerged: roughly 80 percent of the decisions you logged were recurring, low-stakes, and consumed far more attention than their outcomes warranted. You had spent more cumulative time deciding what to eat across three meals than you spent on the one strategic decision that actually mattered that day. Your decision energy was being consumed by the wrong things, and you had never noticed because you had never looked.

This concept is part of Phase 38 (Choice Architecture) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for choice architecture.