Think about the last important decision you made, not what you decided because you already know that, but when, what time was it, where were you, how did your body feel when you said "that's it, it's over"?
Because I've been there, I've made big decisions at one in the morning, burned out, hungry, angry at someone who had nothing to do with the situation, and the next day I'd wake up with that feeling of "why did I do that?", not because the decision was bad but because I made it from my worst version of myself.
And many times the problem isn't what you decide but when you decide it, and there's a study published in the journal Cognition that confirms it: they analyzed how the quality of our decisions changes depending on the time of day and what they found is simple but devastating, in the morning we decide more slowly but with more precision, and as the day goes on we decide faster but worse.
In other words: your brain in the morning sits down, compares, analyzes. Your brain at night wants to close tabs and for the day to be over, and in that mode it takes shortcuts.
So if we know this, why do we keep making the most important decisions of our lives at any hour, just because we "couldn't take it anymore"?
There's something I found very useful to understand and I want to share it with you because I'm sure it's going to change the way you make decisions. Your day has three phases, it doesn't matter if you're an early riser or a night owl because all three exist. The peak is the window where you think with the most clarity, the most logic, the most capacity to see long term. The low point is that moment of less energy, more distraction and less self-control, that window where you don't know if you need a coffee, a nap or a career change. And the recovery, where some energy comes back but of a different kind, more relaxed, more creative, less rigid.
And the mistake most of us make is taking life decisions in the low point, tired, irritated, fed up, because from there everything seems terrible and irreparable, but it's not your life that's broken, it's your battery that's low.
Picture this.
It's Tuesday, 10 at night, you worked all day, you had an argument with someone, you didn't eat well, you're scrolling through feeds watching everyone else's life, and suddenly: "That's it. Tomorrow I quit. This isn't for me."
Or you've spent three weeks accumulating resentment with your partner without saying anything, and in the first serious argument at 11 at night you say "this is over", not because you thought it through but because you couldn't take it anymore, which is not the same thing.
When you decide at your worst moment of the day it's not your adult self deciding but your tired self, and that version of you shouldn't be in charge of anything important.
I've applied three things since I understood this, and they're not theory but rules I use with myself.
The first: big decisions spend a night in the fridge, if at 11 at night I feel like sending everything to hell I write down what I feel, everything, unfiltered, I go to sleep, and the next day in my best hour I reread it, if it still makes sense then fine, and if it was exhaustion talking I just saved myself a disaster.
The second: I schedule decisions, not just tasks, it sounds strange but it works, I block 30 minutes in my best energy window to sit with a single topic, no phone, no noise, because deciding calmly is also work and not an accident between things.
The third: I never evaluate an entire project from the middle of a low point because the middle of any process is the worst moment to evaluate it, the novelty is gone, the results haven't arrived, and your brain tells you nothing is working, but that's not a diagnosis but a feeling, and in the middle the feeling is always the same: wanting to give up.
When you stop deciding in the heat of the moment and executing in the heat of the moment you start to notice something: it's not that you don't know how to decide but that you were deciding from your worst version of yourself.
If you take one single idea from all of this let it be this: it's not just about what you decide but about when you sit down to decide it, start seeing your day as a map with zones, when do you think best, when do you sabotage yourself most, at what hour are you making the decisions that define your life?
And the next time you feel like you can't take it anymore and you're about to send that message, make that call or delete that project, ask yourself first: is this a decision or is my low battery talking?
Because it's not about not feeling but about not letting the most exhausted version of you be the one who signs the papers.
With purpose,
Danny Daniel.
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