Decisions I Didn't Have to Make

Every morning, Steve Jobs reached into his wardrobe and found exactly the same thing. A black mock neck. Levi's 501 jeans. A pair of New Balance trainers.

For years, people assumed it was a branding exercise — a carefully constructed image that became inseparable from Apple itself. It certainly became iconic. But Jobs gave a much simpler explanation. He wanted to remove one decision from his day. Not because choosing clothes was difficult, but because every decision, however small, asks something of us.

Most of us don't notice it happening. We wake up. Open the wardrobe. What should I wear today? Does this go with that? Will I be too warm, too cold, too formal, too casual? None of these questions are particularly important on their own. But they arrive before the day has properly begun.

Psychologists have spent years studying what happens when we make repeated decisions. One idea, often called decision fatigue, suggests that every choice draws from the same pool of mental energy. The science continues to evolve, but the broader principle has held up surprisingly well: the fewer unnecessary decisions we make, the more attention we can give to the ones that matter. Barack Obama once said he limited the colours of his suits for exactly this reason. Mark Zuckerberg did something similar. The writer Barry Schwartz made a related case in The Paradox of Choice — that beyond a certain point, more options don't make us happier. They create more doubt, more comparison, more mental clutter. Sometimes freedom isn't found in having more choices. Sometimes it's found in needing fewer.

I've been thinking about all this because I've apparently achieved a version of it myself, without ever meaning to.

I haven't bought a single item of clothing for myself in about ten years. My wardrobe has simply got smaller and smaller — not through any decision to simplify, but because my attention has been somewhere else entirely: building businesses, home-educating my children, being a size I'm not always at peace with. Buying clothes for myself has just never made it onto the list. So, by accident, I have a version of the Jobs uniform. Fewer decisions in the morning, because there's less to decide between.

My husband got to the same place completely differently.

He's up at four every morning. Showers, trains for an hour, eats breakfast, walks the dogs, makes his own packed lunch, goes to work. He comes home and walks the dogs again. His work uniform is a shirt and smart trousers, and it's laid out the night before, every time, without fail — alongside his dog-walking clothes, and separately, his loungewear for the evening. Everything decided in advance, deliberately, every single day. He is, by a wide margin, the most routine person I have ever met. It puts my ADHD to shame. I've got an app on my phone that's supposed to help me track vitamins and exercise and keep me on some kind of schedule. It works, genuinely, for about three weeks. Then something happens — it barely matters what — and I'm out of the routine as fast as I fell into it.

So there are two of us in this house who've both arrived at "fewer decisions, more room for life." He built his on purpose, brick by brick, protecting it fiercely. Mine happened because life got full enough that an entire category of decisions — what to buy, what to wear, what to want for myself — just quietly stopped getting made.

I'm not sure those are the same achievement, even though they land in the same place from the outside. His routine is a wall he built. Mine is more like a room that got smaller because I stopped putting anything new into it.

I don't know yet whether I want to build my version the way he built his — deliberately, on purpose, decided in advance. Or whether the version I have, imperfect and accidental as it is, has been quietly doing its job anyway, just without me noticing until now.