What I Learned From Wearing the Same Outfit for 2 Weeks

To learn about the curious malady known as “decision fatigue,” I was given a very simple assignment: Wear the same outfit and automate as many daily decisions as possible for two weeks and write about whether it gave me more mental clarity. That was it. Easy breezy. I jumped right in.

Related: Stop Overthinking It: 9 Ways to Make Decisions With Confidence

On Day 1, I picked out a crisp white shirt, got dressed, opened the front door and promptly spilled coffee all over myself. The first lesson of automating your wardrobe: Select dark fabrics.

“I get to wake up every day and help serve more than a billion people. And I feel like I’m not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my life.” —Mark Zuckerberg

By “automating your wardrobe,” I mean following the fashion examples of Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and others whose jobs demand a daily deluge of global-scale decision-making. The idea is simple: To preserve brain space for the big calls, cut back on the less significant ones, because the collective weight of your choices, layered over and over each other, creates what psychologists call decision fatigue. Officially, that’s the “deteriorating quality of decisions made by an individual after a long session of decision-making,” says Jonathan Levav, Ph.D., associate professor at Stanford University. Colloquially it means reaching 4 p.m. and no longer giving a damn about the logjam of problems in your inbox.

You can’t always control the flow of the big questions, but you can manage the small ones. Zuckerberg has a family and a Facebook, and he tends to both in simple gray crew-neck T-shirts. (On his first day back from paternity leave, he posted a photo of his gray-on-gray closet and asked what he should wear.) Jobs was too busy inventing the future to worry much about pattern-matching, so he stuck with jeans and black mock turtlenecks. In a July profile, The New York Timeswrote that President Barack Obama—who wears only blue and gray suits—daydreamed about retiring to Hawaii to open a T-shirt shop that sold only one size (medium) and one color (white) with Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago and his former chief of staff. When he and Emanuel were faced with problems that had no conclusive answer, they’d turn to each other. “White,” Emanuel would say. “Medium,” Obama would shoot back.

“Making decisions uses the very same willpower that you use to say no to doughnuts, drugs or illicit sex,” Florida State professor Roy Baumeister, Ph.D., told The New York Times in 2011. “It’s the same willpower you use to be polite or to wait your turn or to drag yourself out of bed or to hold off going to the bathroom.” He explored this and more with John Tierney in their book, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.

Levav and two other researchers conducted a 2011 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that found Israeli judges paroled prisoners who appeared early in the morning about 65 percent of the time, while those with late-afternoon appointments were paroled less than 10 percent of the time. The afternoon prisoners weren’t significantly different; they just showed up when the judges were tired and therefore making the lowest-maintenance calls.

Generally speaking, I have fewer problems than Obama, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Israeli judges and most people on earth. But I do have a wife, two energetic sons, a writing business and a daily grind. I also love making decisions in the most convoluted manner possible, which usually involves some combination of instinct, friend recommendations, Yelp suggestions, Amazon testimonials, random Google searches and several competing strains of obsessive-compulsive disorder. (Recently I took two days to decide which NASCAR hat to buy.) There is more data available to us now than ever before, and I do cannonball dives into it.I was intrigued to see whether eliminating the tiny, wee decisions (Am I feeling the BLT or the tomato basil soup?) would truly free up hard-drive space for the big ones. I dug in and made a plan, and then I spilled coffee all over it.

Invisible Forces

First I needed a new outfit.

This proved tricky. Deciding what to wear on a garden-variety Tuesday is one thing; picking an outfit to which you’ll be chained for two weeks introduces several new layers of commitment.

I considered my needs. I work from home, so on many days my interactions are limited to baristas and the lunch crew at Amore Pizzeria. I don’t need anything fancy, but I do need adaptability—something suited for home and the coffee shop, lunches and interviews, school registration and playgrounds. I also needed something temperature-appropriate. (I wrote this during a murderous July heat wave that inflated temperatures in my Indiana hometown from Comfortable Low 80s to Surface of the Sun.) I also hoped to be reasonably stylish—nothing sleeveless, no bracelets and no concert T-shirts, although I did look preeeetty hard at my Guns N’ Roses shirt.

Once I started considering these questions, others began bubbling up faster than I could swat them away: Should I wear button-up shirts? Will I be too hot? Should I stick with short sleeves? Jeans or shorts? I don’t like wearing shorts. If I wear shorts, does that mean shoes or sandals? Am I a hard no on the Guns N’ Roses shirt?

Then it hit me: This was the exact sort of unending, superficial, time-killing decision-making I was assigned to avoid. Four minutes in and I was already slogging through an invisible decision swamp about my outfit when I had specific orders not to.

“Let’s add to the mix the extensive pressure on women to uphold a flawless appearance…. These black trousers and white blouses have become an important daily reminder that frankly, I’m in control.” —Matilda Kahl

I stopped it cold and went full Zuck: gray crew-neck T-shirt, jeans and a pair of Vans. It was versatile and inexpensive, and no one would notice if I coated myself in coffee. I stacked a week’s worth of outfits in my closet for easy morning access and did a hard reset.

Routine Maintenance

When picking my official automated outfit, I realized an unsettling truth: I wear a lot of the same clothes anyway.

I’m a person of pleasant, arguably predictable, routine. I use one brand of toothpaste and shop at the same supermarket. I always order a burger with blue cheese and jalapeños at the local diner. We’ve made a 12-hour drive to visit family down South for years, and I find myself pulling into the same gas stations, grabbing to-go sandwiches at the same restaurants. Even my subconscious, it seems, is more comfortable with the familiar. I justify it as adhering to what I’m accustomed to, though the skeptical could say, “Try some different cheese, dude.” When I told friends about this assignment, they gave me a look that unmistakably said, “This will not be your most strenuous challenge of 2016.”

In all likelihood, you’re in a routine, too. “Most people have a fairly structured morning routine where they do the same things, eat the same foods,” Baumeister says. “The human mind is well set up to form habits and routines to conserve its energy.”According to internet sources, which are rarely wrong, American adults make 35,000 decisions a day: scrambled or over-easy, let the kids watch one more Octonauts or go to the pool, stop for gas here or nearer to day care? They tire us out. Psychologists like Baumeister are starting to understand the wear and tear they leave on our minds. Businesses know it, too. Levav found that by manipulating the order of choices to put the more expensive default options last when people had grown weary of making decisions, custom-suit stores and car companies could encourage customers to spend more. (“High-end rims? Sure, fine, whatever.”) Eliminating choice works, too: online mattress companies such as Casper and Tuft & Needle are disrupting the awful in-store mattress-buying process by offering one mattress. Buy it or don’t. Casper is on pace to earn $200 million in the next year.

In most cases, we stick with what we like. For instance, I decided to automate my coffee orders and discovered that apparently I did that four years ago. This is common: Chris Garrett, manager at my local coffee shop, says nearly all of his regulars have a single order, breaking only when they earn a reward, and even then they tend to order the same drink in a larger size or with an extra shot. Audrey Brinkley, a barista for just under a year, says customers aren’t inclined to venture out of their comfort zones unless pushed by a friend or seasonal menu updates. “They don’t think of changing their drinks until you put a new one in front of them.” This was interesting to learn, and terrible for my science. What good was intentional automation if I was already mostly automating?

I started looking for anything I could drop from my daily decisions. I determined that my kids and I would have the same breakfasts: scrambled eggs, Cinnamon Toast Crunch and a frosted brown sugar Pop-Tart. (Full disclosure: I’ve been eating the latter pretty much every morning for 30 years so that was no big deal.) To limit screwing around with music in my car, I packed a dozen CDs to cut down on my ability to fire up my phone and pick from every song ever recorded. I sought out low-hanging decision fruit: I parked in the same place at home and the store. I ran the same loop around my neighborhood. I settled in. I waited for the avalanche of crystal mental clarity.

Mixed Emotions

First: The good news. During the initial couple of days, a load came off of my shoulders—a light one, sure, but a load nonetheless. My wife works early shifts, so on mornings with coffee to be made, smoothies to blend, day cares to reach, Cubs scores to check and a clock supplying constant, low-level deadline pressure, every little bit of automation helped. I can’t say it revealed brilliant new horizons, but it trimmed the to-do list, which I always welcome.

What’s more, I grew accustomed to my uniform. It’s curious to have one, and I can’t deny the dullish 1984 vibe that surfaced from time to time. But there was also a vague calm to it. I could feel things becoming more efficient, less stressed—not a dramatic lifestyle upgrade, but extra bandwidth. The experiment was working! Life operated a little more smoothly. That lasted for a good four or five days before everything suddenly got super boring.

Turns out when you’re already automating much of your life, making it official can feel suffocating. Right around the beginning of the second week, I began to feel severe burnout regarding gray. I started to miss my other shirts (especially you, Guns N’ Roses). I felt less like the experiment was streamlining my decision process and more like it was eliminating choice. Eventually it felt like work. “Maybe dressing the same is restful for Zuckerberg, but you reacted against it,” says Levav (who, for the record, dresses each morning in whatever T-shirt is closest).

But I missed the point, he says: “The critical issue here isn’t wearing a gray shirt every day, but routinizing your behavior. It’s not about a specific routine, it’s about having a routine.” For me, too little choice was limiting; too much created a paradox wherein I required two days to buy a Brad Keselowski hat.

That said, drawing from a smaller, pre-established pool positively cut down on time and energy. My closet is a lot of blue and gray, sure, but I got to pick which blue and gray. Too little choice scrambles the system; too much oversaturates it. When my experiment ended, I went to the coffee shop in sandals and my GNR T-shirt and ordered an iced green tea, something I rarely drink. After all, some choice is good.