Decision Fatigue for Entrepreneurs: Why Waiting Is a Decision and How to Decide Faster

Written by Aja Marie Horváth

Editorial Series | Founder Notes | The Cost of the Last Possible Moment

description: Decision fatigue for entrepreneurs, honestly: what the research really shows, why waiting is itself a decision, and a five-step method to decide faster. Target keyword: decision fatigue for entrepreneurs Secondary keywords: how to make decisions faster as a founder, indecision in business, fear of making the wrong decision, one-way door and two-way door decisions, decision paralysis entrepreneur, women entrepreneurs decision making

The Cost of the Last Possible Moment

Decision fatigue for entrepreneurs is real as an experience, but the famous science behind it, from hungry judges to "ego depletion", has struggled under replication. The more useful truth for a founder is simpler: waiting until the last possible moment is itself a decision, and often the worst version of it, because delay quietly removes the options you could have taken back. Sort your choices into reversible and irreversible, decide the reversible ones quickly with the information you have, and give every open decision a date.

"The important thing is not to make the right decision. It is to make a decision."

Anyone who has spent time in entrepreneurship has heard that sentence, on stages, in podcasts, in the captions of people who are very confident about other people's courage. I knew it the way you know a proverb: completely, and not at all.

Because for a really long time, I hesitated.

Not out of laziness, and not for lack of ideas. I hesitated on business decisions because I was scared. Scared that certain partners would leave. Scared that some clients would not like what B0LD was doing. Scared that my posts were not as perfect as I wished they were. And under all of it, the quiet one that sits beneath every other fear a founder has: scared that I was not doing a good enough job.

So I waited. I kept two roads open and told myself I was being strategic. I was standing at a fork with a map in each hand, calling it a plan.

Then, on a Tuesday at the end of October, I heard myself say it, mostly to myself: I am just so exhausted of being in between decisions.

That sentence did what the proverb never had. I decided. One way or the other, it has to work. I have to go in one direction.

This is a note about what I understood in that moment, and why I now believe that the cost of a decision is rarely the decision itself. It is the time you spend not making it.

What decision fatigue for entrepreneurs really is (and what the research actually says)

Search for decision fatigue for entrepreneurs and you will find generous advice: wear the same outfit, automate your mornings, decide before noon. Much of it rests on one striking story, so it is worth telling accurately.

In 2011, Shai Danziger, Jonathan Levav and Liora Avnaim-Pesso published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analysing 1,112 rulings by Israeli parole boards. Favourable decisions fell from about 65% at the start of a session to nearly zero by its end, then returned to about 65% after a food break. The authors suggested mental depletion as a possible cause, and the "hungry judge" became one of the most quoted, and most contested, findings in popular psychology.

Keren Weinshall-Margel and John Shapard argued in the same journal that case order was not random: prisoners without legal representation tended to be heard last and were less likely to be paroled. The original authors replied that the pattern held when they controlled for representation. Then, in 2016, Andreas Glöckner published simulations in Judgment and Decision Making showing that a perfectly rational judge, one who simply avoids starting a longer favourable case just before a break, could reproduce a substantial part of the drop on its own. His conclusion was careful: the effect is probably much smaller than reported, if it exists at all, and his simulations could not rule depletion out entirely.

The laboratory idea underneath it, that self-control draws on a limited resource that runs down with use, fared worse. A preregistered replication across 23 laboratories and 2,141 participants, led by Martin Hagger and Nikos Chatzisarantis and published in Perspectives on Psychological Science in 2016, found an effect close to zero. A larger multisite test led by Kathleen Vohs, with 36 laboratories and 3,531 participants, published in Psychological Science in 2021, found no evidence for the effect in its preregistered analyses.

So here is the honest position. The tiredness you feel at the end of a day of choices is real. The tidy mechanism that explains it, and the idea that your judgement simply runs out like a battery, is not settled science. I find that liberating rather than disappointing, because it moves the problem somewhere you can act on. I have written before, in December Without Burnout, that a great deal of founder exhaustion is decision fatigue wearing workload's coat. I would refine that now. What wears a founder down is often not the decisions she makes. It is the ones she carries, unmade, from one week into the next.

An open decision is not neutral. It occupies a room in your mind, and you keep paying the rent.

Why waiting is itself a decision

This is the part I understood on that Tuesday, and it is the argument of this whole note.

When you stay between two roads until the very last point at which you can still choose, you have not avoided a decision. You have made one: you have decided to let time narrow your options for you. And time is not a thoughtful strategist. By the last possible moment, the conversation you could have had calmly has become urgent. The partner who might have been brought along gently has already sensed the hesitation. The launch that could have been tested has to ship as it is. You are forced into a direction, and in that direction there is no real going back.

That is how bad decisions are made. Not usually through a wrong choice, but through a late one.

Jeff Bezos gave the most useful vocabulary for this in his letter to Amazon shareholders published in 2016. Some decisions, he wrote, are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible, one-way doors, and they deserve to be made methodically and carefully. He called these Type 1. But most decisions are changeable and reversible, two-way doors, and he argued that these Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by individuals or small groups with good judgement. The danger he described was treating every decision with the heavy, slow process designed for the irreversible ones.

In the following year's letter, he went further. Most decisions, he suggested, should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had; if you wait for 90%, you are probably being slow. Being wrong can often be corrected, he wrote, but being slow is going to be expensive for sure. The skill is not perfect foresight. It is being good at quickly recognising and correcting bad decisions.

Here is what I would add, from the smaller and more intimate scale of a founder-led business. Delay turns two-way doors into one-way doors. A decision that was perfectly reversible in September often is not in December. A partnership that could have been redesigned becomes a partnership that ends. A brand direction that could have been tested becomes a brand direction you have to defend. The door was open the whole time. You simply stood in it until it closed.

The fear underneath indecision in business

Indecision in business rarely presents itself as fear. It presents itself as diligence: one more conversation, one more draft, one more month of watching. But sit with the hesitation long enough and it usually has a face. Mine had four.

The fear that partners will leave. This one is quiet and serious, because people matter. But a partner who stays only because you never decide anything is not really a partner in the direction of the business; they are a partner in its postponement. Clarity gives people something to say yes to, and, yes, something to leave. Both are information you need.

The fear that clients will dislike what you are doing. Some will. Positioning is, by definition, a choice about who you are for, which is also a choice about who you are not for. A brand that tries to remain acceptable to every past client becomes invisible to every future one. The clients you keep after a clear decision are the ones who chose the direction, not the ones who tolerated your hesitation.

The fear that the work is not perfect. The post that waits until it is perfect is usually published late, tired, and slightly worse, because the energy that should have gone into the work went into the waiting. A good post published is a two-way door. You can edit it, follow it, contradict it next month. An unpublished masterpiece is not a door at all.

The fear that you are not doing a good enough job. This is the root, and it does not respond to arguments. It responds to evidence, and evidence only comes from movement. You cannot learn whether a direction works while standing still between two of them.

Research on regret offers a gentle reframe. Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec argued in the 1990s that people tend to regret their actions more in the short term, but their inactions more in the long run, because the sting of a regrettable action fades relatively quickly while the ache of what was never tried lingers. Daniel Kahneman challenged them, and the three published a partial resolution together in Psychological Review in 1998: regrets of action tend to be hot and brief, while regrets of inaction can be wistful or genuinely painful. Not a law, but a useful warning.

And one more study, which I find quietly radical. The economist Steven Levitt invited people stuck on a hard choice to let a coin toss guide them, and then followed up. In his paper, first released through the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2016 and later published in The Review of Economic Studies, people whom the coin told to make a change, such as quitting a job, were much more likely to make it, and were happier six months later than those told to keep the status quo. The participants chose to take part and reported their own happiness, so this is not a verdict for every founder. But Levitt's reading is worth keeping on your desk: people may be overly cautious when facing life-changing choices.

There is no real way to know what will happen. Although, I am told, there is now an AI that can apparently do that for you. Until it starts signing contracts on your behalf, the deciding is still yours.

How to make decisions faster as a founder: the Threshold Method

This is not a productivity hack. It is a small discipline for anyone who has been standing in a doorway too long. I call it the Threshold Method, because every decision is a threshold, and the only real mistake is to live on one.

First, name the door. Before you think about the answer, decide what kind of decision it is. Ask whether you could undo it within a month at a cost you could survive, and if you could, it is a two-way door and it deserves speed, not ceremony. Most of what keeps founders awake, from the post to the offer to the price test, belongs here.

Second, set the first sufficient moment. Do not wait for the last possible moment; choose the first moment at which you will know enough. Write a date beside the decision, earlier than your instinct wants, because a decision without a date is not a decision in progress, it is a decision in storage.

Third, give the fear its full sentence. Write down exactly what you are afraid will happen, with names if there are names: this partner leaves, this client is disappointed, this post is criticised. Fear written in full is usually smaller than fear left as a feeling, and when it is not smaller, you have discovered a one-way door and should slow down on purpose rather than by accident.

Fourth, choose with what you know. Make the best decision you can believe in at this moment, with the information you have, which will rarely feel like enough. Bezos's 70% is a reminder rather than a formula: if you are waiting for certainty, you are waiting for something that does not arrive in business.

Fifth, commit out loud, and set the review. Tell one person what you decided, then put a review date in your calendar. The commitment protects you from the slow drift back into the doorway, and the review date is what keeps a two-way door honest: you are not promising to be right forever, only to look again on a specific day.

I have a line I repeat so often it has become a method of its own: let me fact-check this and test it in the market first. The Threshold Method is that line with a deadline attached. Test, yes. But decide when the test ends, before you begin it.

If your open decision is about what you sell this season, the same discipline applies to the offer itself. In One Offer, One Sentence I argue that choosing one holiday offer is less about the offer than about the courage to let one thing lead. It is the Threshold Method in a December coat.

For the women building companies

Many women founders are not indecisive. They are considerate. They hold everyone's reaction in mind at once, the partner, the client, the follower, and try to find the direction that disappoints no one.

That direction does not exist. Looking for it is how a thoughtful woman ends up standing in a doorway for a year.

What I want to say to you is what I needed to hear myself. Deciding is not a betrayal of your kindness. It is a form of it. A clear direction is a gift to the people around you, because it tells them where you are going and lets them choose, freely, whether to come. Hesitation feels gentle, but it asks everyone else to carry your uncertainty with you.

You do not need to become harder to decide faster. You do not need the borrowed vocabulary of hustle, the war metaphors, the performance of certainty. Poised, not alpha. The most formidable founders I have met are not loud. They are simply finished deliberating before the room is.

And if your posts are not yet as perfect as you wish, publish them anyway. The version of you that will write the perfect one is built by the version who published the imperfect ones.

Where to go deeper: Positioning Sprint in a Box, Feminine Flow in Business, and the B0LD community

If the decision you keep postponing is about your brand, what you stand for, who you are for, and what you will stop doing, it is a positioning question wearing an operational disguise. Positioning Sprint in a Box ($36) is our compact positioning sprint workbook, made for exactly this: a short, focused push to choose a direction and commit to it.

If the hesitation is less about the brand and more about the way you work, the rhythm, the pressure, the sense of always being slightly behind your own standards, Feminine Flow in Business ($36) is our workbook on building and running a business in a feminine, sustainable rhythm.

FAQ

What is decision fatigue for entrepreneurs? It describes the sense that the quality of your choices declines after a long run of decisions. Founders feel it acutely because nearly every choice in a young company passes through them. The feeling is real, but the best-known evidence for the mechanism, including the 2011 parole-judge study and the "ego depletion" theory, has been heavily contested in later research and large replications.

Is decision fatigue scientifically proven? Not in its popular form. Large preregistered replications of ego depletion, across 23 labs in 2016 and 36 labs in 2021, found effects close to zero or none, and the parole-judge finding has plausible alternative explanations such as case ordering. It is wiser to treat decision fatigue as a description of an experience than as a settled law of the brain.

How can I make decisions faster as a founder? Sort each decision into a one-way door (hard to reverse) or a two-way door (easy to reverse), a distinction Jeff Bezos popularised in his letters to Amazon shareholders. Decide two-way doors quickly with the information you have, set a date for every open decision, write your fear down in full, then commit out loud and schedule a review.

Why is waiting until the last minute a bad way to decide? Because waiting is itself a decision. Delay removes options and often turns a reversible choice into an irreversible one, so you end up forced into a direction with no real way back. Deciding earlier keeps more of your doors open.

How do I stop being afraid of making the wrong business decision? You rarely stop being afraid; you make the fear smaller and more specific. Write down exactly what you fear will happen, check whether the decision is actually reversible, and remember that most business choices can be corrected. Research on regret suggests that what we never tried can stay with us longer than what we tried and got wrong.

Sources

Aja Marie Horváth
Next

January Marketing Plan for Small Business: A New Year Marketing Strategy That Starts December 26 (2027)