How to Know Which Decisions Deserve Your Energy, and Which Don’t
The mattress vs. the bed legs
When was the last time you bought a new mattress? For most of us, it’s a once-a-decade decision, but one with consequences you’ll feel every night. When choosing a mattress, there are plenty of factors we need to consider—firm or soft, memory foam or hybrid, double or king. Each question carries weight, since good sleep affects mood, health, and productivity.1
The bed frame, though? That’s a different story.
When our new bed arrived, the delivery team offered two options for the legs:
- Dark wood matched the frame.
- Light wood matched the floor.
For a moment, I thought about taking photos, sending them to my partner, and negotiating until we reach a consensus. But then I stopped.
It didn’t matter.
The legs wouldn’t change how we slept. The options were identical in quality and price. And thanks to the mere exposure effect, our tendency to develop a preference for things simply because we’re familiar with them, whichever color we picked would feel “right” in a week.
The bigger reason? Not every decision deserves equal mental energy.
Decision fatigue is real. Time spent agonizing over bed-leg color is time not spent on higher-impact choices, like choosing the right mattress. Ironically, it’s the trivial choices we should fly past—yet they’re equally capable of bogging us down.
Why small choices feel bigger than they are
People often find themselves stuck spending too much time and effort on minor decisions.
We stress about which pair of shoes to buy, debate over which restaurant to dine at, and spend a lot of time choosing the best off-white shade for the living room walls. For example, in a field experiment with real monetary consequences, researchers found that when faced with hard trade-offs people occasionally invest more time in less important decisions than in critical ones.2
A prevailing explanation for this phenomenon comes from meta-cognition and the use of heuristics that guide our decision-making. In this case, people treat the difficulty of a decision as a signal of its importance. When a simple choice feels unexpectedly hard, we assume it must matter more, spend extra time on it, and risk getting stuck in a self-reinforcing “quicksand” loop. We apply backward reasoning: if it feels hard, it must be important.2
While this works in some contexts, it can misfire when difficulty stems from irrelevant factors—such as having an excessive number of options to select from (a.k.a. choice overload), feeling overwhelmed by too much information, grappling with conflicting trade-offs,3,4 and encountering difficulties in perception or mental processing fluency.5,6
Confusing perceived difficulty with actual importance can lead us to invest disproportionate time and energy into trivial choices—sometimes even more than we devote to the decisions that actually matter.
To prevent becoming trapped in these deceiving decisions, it’s helpful to spend some time classifying the kinds of choices we have to make in simple quadrants.
References
- Warner, L. (2025, June 1). What happens during sleep — and how to improve it. Harvard Health Publishing. Retrieved October 13, 2025, from https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/what-happens-during-sleep-and-how-to-improve-it
- Sela, A., & Berger, J. (2012). Decision quicksand: How trivial choices suck us in. Journal of Consumer Research, 39(2), 360-370.
- Chatterjee, S., & Heath, T. B. (1996). Conflict and loss aversion in multiattribute choice: The effects of trade-off size and reference dependence on decision difficulty. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 67(2), 144-155.
- Tversky, A., & Shafir, E. (1992). Choice under conflict: The dynamics of deferred decision. Psychological science, 3(6), 358-361.
- Schwarz, N. (2004). Metacognitive experiences in consumer judgment and decision making. Journal of consumer psychology, 14(4), 332-348.
- Misuraca, R., Nixon, A. E., Miceli, S., Di Stefano, G., & Scaffidi Abbate, C. (2024). On the advantages and disadvantages of choice: future research directions in choice overload and its moderators. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1290359.
- Banuri, S. (2023). The decisive mind: How to make the right choice every time. Hodder & Stoughton.
- Ethics Unwrapped. (n.d.). Packing peanuts for profit [Video]. University of Texas at Austin. Retrieved October 13, 2025, from https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/video/packing-peanuts-for-profit
- Duke, A. (2020). How to decide: Simple tools for making better choices. Portfolio.
- Berger, L. (2025). Delegating: The key to a dinner party you actually enjoy. Psychology Today: Radical Sabbatical. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/radical-sabbatical/202506/delegating-the-key-to-a-dinner-party-you-actually-enjoy
- Luca, M., & Bazerman, M. H. (2020). Want to make better decisions? Start experimenting. MIT Sloan Management Review, 61(4), 67–73.
- Soll, J. B., Milkman, K. L., & Payne, J. W. (2014). A user's guide to debiasing. In G. Keren & G. Wu (Eds.), Wiley-Blackwell handbook of judgment and decision making (Chapter 33). Wiley-Blackwell.
- Larrick, R. P. (2004). Debiasing. Blackwell handbook of judgment and decision making, 316-338.
- Alliance for Decision Education (2024). Structuring decisions. Alliance for Decision Education. Retrieved August 12, 2025, from https://alliancefordecisioneducation.org/what-is-decision-education/structuring-decisions/
- Moleskis, M. (2025). Decision-making in the workplace. Global Association of Applied Behavioural Scientists. https://www.gaabs.org/research
About the Author
Melina Moleskis
Dr. Melina Moleskis is the founder of meta-decisions, a consultancy that leverages management science and behavioral economics to help people and organizations make better decisions. Drawing from her dual background in business and academia, she works with determination towards uncovering pragmatic, sustainable solutions that improve performance for clients. Melina is also a visiting Professor of Technology Management as she enjoys spending time in the classroom (teaching as the best route to learning) and is always on the lookout for technology applications in behavioral science. In her prior roles, Melina has served as an economic and business consultant for 7 years in various countries, gaining international experience across industries and the public sector. She holds a PhD in Managerial Decision Science from IESE Business School, MBA in Strategy from NYU Stern and BSc in Mathematics and Economics from London School of Economics.
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