You don’t see it on your balance sheet. You don’t flag it in the weekly KPIs. But it undercuts your clarity, kills your momentum, and quietly costs you millions.
Let’s uncover what decision fatigue really is for growth‑stage leaders, how it shows up in your day, why it matters for scaling, and what to do about it now.
Decision fatigue is the invisible tax growth‑stage leaders pay when they don’t manage their decision load. It drains time, clarity, speed, quality, and team momentum.
Here’s your recap:
Recognise it: you’re making too many decisions that could be freed up
Reduce load: delegate, filter, simplify
Protect your prime thinking time
Build protocols and recovery into your system
When you do, you don’t just feel less tired, you’re worth more. Your decisions get sharper, your team responds faster, your growth accelerates.
Jaime Bolanos
•
November 5, 2025
What Decision Fatigue Looks Like in Leadership
Decision fatigue isn’t just feeling tired of decisions. It’s when your brain starts taking shortcuts, avoiding choices, or making weaker ones because you’re drained. Atlassian+1
For growth‑stage leaders, that might show up like:
Slower approvals and bottlenecks in trivial tasks
Declining quality of strategy decisions late in the week
You defaulting to “yes” because you’re too tired to argue
You delaying the thinking work you need most
The compounding of small errors that then become bigger ones
In other words: You’re still busy. But your high‑impact thinking is getting crowded out.
Why This Is a Growth‑Stage Problem
When you’re scrambling to survive, decisions are reactive. At scale, you need to decide what to decide, when, and who. Every choice scales: team structure, go‑to‑market, capital allocation, culture. Decision fatigue now isn’t just inconvenience. It’s strategic risk.
According to one recent piece, growth‑stage leaders who neglect decision‑work report higher stress, weaker execution, and slower time to market. Forbes
The science backs it. The brain’s decision‑making system (System 2) requires energy and becomes fatigued like a muscle. financialexecutivesjournal.com+1 When you make dozens of decisions before lunch, the decisions after lunch degrade. That matters for your growth curve.
The Invisible Costs You’re Likely Paying
You don’t always see these impacts, but they’re present:
Opportunity cost: Your best ideas get squeezed out because you’re busy clearing the path rather than forging it.
Speed loss: Delays happen when you’re stuck making the same small decisions that someone else should be taking.
Team fatigue: Leaders who hesitate or over‑analyze pass that pressure to their teams, who then wait for clarity.
Quality erosion: Small, strategic choices degrade, meaning you’re less sharp when it counts.
Burnout risk: Decision fatigue often precedes burnout because the mental load isn’t visible, but still accumulates. The Entrepreneurs' Center+1
Imagine you bill your brain time at $300/hour (conservative). If decision fatigue degrades just 2 hours of thinking time per week, that’s $600/week of lost leadership value, not even counting downstream effects.
Four Key Triggers for Decision Fatigue
What throws you into the decision‑drain? Here are the most common triggers for growth‑stage leaders:
1. Choice overload
You’re bombarded with requests, decisions, options. The more decisions you make, the fewer good ones you can make later. The Decision Lab+1
2. Context switching
Moving from product roadmaps to HR conflicts to partner decks to investor asks creates mental fatigue and drains your capacity. Paymo
3. Lack of recovery
Your high‑impact thinking needs quiet, reset, and space. Without it, you burn the cognitive budget each day. The Entrepreneurs' Center
4. Unclear decision protocols
When everything lands on your desk because no one knows “who decides what,” you’re making decisions you shouldn’t and exhausting your mental bandwidth. PMC
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