At 13th Avenue Interiors, one thing I strive to provide for every family is to remove decision fatigue from their projects. This term may sound familiar, but to clarify, it is defined as the "difficulty in making a good decision experienced as a result of the number of decisions one needs to take." Essentially, this means the more decisions we make, the lower in quality those decisions become.
The symptoms of decision fatigue have some pretty startling effects that include
Procrastination: putting the decision off until later
Impulsivity: making a rash decision based on little evidence
Avoidance: avoiding the decision altogether
Indecision: battling back and forth between various choices
Some other side effects that also have a direct impact on the way we design our house are:
Sticking with the status quo (buying what everyone else is buying)
Fall back to easy choices (repeat purchase of something you don't love)
Reluctant to make trade-offs (going over your budget)
Difficult to exercise self-control (hello, impulse buying!)
While we live in a day and age that gives us endless choices, we rarely stop to think about if it is good that we have this many choices. Is it helping me find what I want or holding me back from moving forward?
Let me show you how decision fatigue shows up in home design and why so many of us get stuck at the beginning or even in the middle of a project.
Example: let's say we're furnishing a bedroom and starting from scratch. Here are the essential furnishings needed for a project of this scale:
- Area rug
- Bed
- Mattress
- Bed linens
- Duvet Insert
- Duvet cover
- Bedside tables
- Bedside lamps
- Dresser
- Art
- Window treatments
- Window Hardware
- Misc décor: throw pillows, blankets, accessories
That is a list of a minimum of 14 things we need to shop for and decide on. If I start by looking for a rug first (we're building from the floor up) and I start on a Big Box website, here is the amount of rug options that pop up:
SAY WHAT!?!? No one has time for scrolling through OVER 300,000 rug options. You may say, I need a 9x12, I want a wool rug, and I'd like something with some blue. Great, those things will help you narrow down the options, but note that you just made three decisions and still have almost 5,000 rug options on this same site.
I could go on and on, but you see my point: within every choice we have to make in a furnishing project, there are several choices behind that. And what happens when something is sold out, back-ordered, out of our price range, or arrives at our house and disappoints because it differs from what appeared online? Well, my friends, it's back to the drawing board and starting the decision-making process all over again.
Does this sound familiar? Feel familiar? Or does it make you feel overwhelmed just to read this? Likely, your answer is "yes" because we've all been in some project, design, or renovation in our homes. And that is precisely why I've built 13th Avenue's services to take all of these decisions off our families' plates, to remove the overwhelm and stress that comes with the infinite amount of choices available to us. When that happens, it frees up space to make more critical decisions about our family and well-being at our jobs and in our communities.
May this sit as a reminder to us all to ask for help when we need it, offload decisions, and make space for what matters most.
XOXO
-L
Articles referenced here:
Comments