I spent the last month wearing the same outfit every day. Someone finally asked me about it yesterday, so I explained my experiment.
Decision fatigue is a thing. I never really noticed how much of a thing it was until I had Covid and the resulting brain fog. I started to think of myself as an RPG character with a certain number of “decision points.” Each decision, no matter how big or small, took one of these points, and when I was all out, making decisions would start pulling away from my energy level.
I never figured out the exact number of decision points I have, and I also suspect that it fluctuates daily. However, I realized they are a finite resource that I needed to conserve.
That is how I came to try wearing a daily uniform. Steve Jobs might be the most famous person to apply this idea with his black turtleneck, jeans, and sneakers. There are a lot of other examples, from Albert Einstein to Mark Zuckerberg, along with a growing number of folks like me trying to make their lives a little simpler. As I was talking about this idea, my friend suggested it was like being a cartoon character, and I might like that idea even more.
What was it like wearing the same outfit for a whole month?
Surprisingly easy. At first, I was self-conscious about wearing identical outfits every day. I thought people would say something about it, but only one person brought it up during the entire month, which was on the 31st day.
By the second week, I had realized that people either didn’t notice me wearing the same thing every time they saw me or didn’t care enough to mention it.
That’s not to say that I didn’t receive a decent number of compliments on the outfit choice, as it is a casual outfit that was a step or two up from my traditional t-shirt and shorts.
The other thing I realized in that second week was that picking from a selection of identical outfits in my closet was still a choice. This is where the most critical tweak during this entire process came in. I started laying out my clothes for the next day.
Getting dressed now has no thought process to it at this point. The clothes are laid out and ready for me in the morning. It sounds inconsequentially simple, but this was when I started to feel the freedom of being a cartoon character.
Another factor that led me to try this is I no longer need to worry about fashion. My outfit works when I go to the store, hang out with friends, or attend a networking event. As long as jeans are acceptable, I don’t need to worry. It is also surprisingly easy to find a casual shirt that goes with jeans and can transition from casual to business casual based on whether you roll the sleeves up.
On top of not worrying about fashion, I also don’t get distracted by clothing at stores anymore. I may see something I like as I walk through a store, but there is no more internal debate on whether I want to buy it. In many ways, this whole part of my life runs on autopilot.
If you want to try this experiment, I suggest getting enough copies of the clothes so that you don’t need to wear them every week. Wearing a uniform daily will show you how tough you are on your clothes.
Aside from my clothing choices, I am taking this idea of removing decisions and applying it in other areas of my life. The first two places that got this attention were how I stock my refrigerator and how I do my status updates at work.
I use a meal prep service, and every week I get a bunch of re-heatable meals delivered. Before I put them into the refrigerator according to which meal it is, I would then look through what I have as an option and pick something. Now I make my weekly menu in advance, deciding what lunch and dinner will be. Just as getting dressed in the morning is a matter of putting on the clothes I laid out the night before, picking out a meal is simply taking the top item off the stack.
Daily status updates are always a fun part of being a software engineer. I’ve done them for years, and still, I forget what I did the day before. I now write my status updates at the end of the day rather than trying to remember them in the morning. This practice has turned into a way to close down my day and leave myself with breadcrumbs for what I want to do the next day.
While none of these changes are particularly earth-shattering, they are helping me focus on other things that I find far more exciting.
Do you have any hacks to reduce decision fatigue?
Also, do you have any suggestions for a catchphrase?
Dan Cook 