Nerd Alert! Did you know the part of your brain that makes things run on auto-pilot is called your basal ganglia? We do not need to think about breathing and our heart-beating. It just happens.

Have you ever wondered why Steve Jobs always wore black? He discovered that he could save 12 hours per year by eliminating the daily two-minute decision on what to wear. Beyond the actual time you spend picking out your clothes, you are making another decision. Every decision is like doing another rep in the gym.

The research is clear, there is an upper limit to the number of decisions that you can make daily. By doing so many reps of monotonous things, at some point your decision-making muscles get tired and you start making poorer decisions. Author Greg McKeown in Essentialism, writes that we need to make some decisions once and not 1,000 times.

Now this may not seem to be a big deal at first but, when you add up all of the times that you think about decisions that you could have put on auto-pilot you begin to see that the most creative among us are also the most boring in every other aspect of their lives.

Am I going to have devotions this morning? That decision is on auto pilot. Brain cells saved! Am I going to surf the web each morning? NO! That decision has been made – no internet before creative work.

Let’s give our prefrontal cortex a break and stop making so many decisions that could be handed off. What decisions can you give your basal ganglia?