UpTrajectory Review

Art Markman, a psychology professor who writes for Fast Company, takes on decision fatigue with a refreshingly blunt premise: the problem is not decisions themselves, but the squandering of finite cognitive fuel on trivialities. His student who wanted to vary their commute captures the well-intentioned mistake many operators make—confusing novelty for productivity. Markman's answer is no. The mental bandwidth spent navigating unfamiliar streets is bandwidth stolen from the actual work of running a business. This framing matters because the creativity-industrial complex has spent years selling entrepreneurs on disruption as a lifestyle, when operational survival often demands the opposite: ruthless conservation of attention.

For small-business operators, this lands with particular force. You are already wearing six hats—sales, operations, finance, HR, marketing, and customer service—often before lunch. Each context switch exacts a cognitive toll that Markman does not quantify but that research consistently shows degrades quality of judgment. The owner choosing between sixteen email marketing platforms at 10 AM, then negotiating a lease at 2 PM, then handling a employee dispute at 4 PM, is not making 'better' decisions as the day wears on. They are making progressively depleted ones. Markman's insight is that the damage starts earlier than we admit, with the supposedly harmless 'what should I work on first' deliberation that consumes the fresh morning mind.

What distinguishes this piece from generic productivity advice is Markman's grounding in habit psychology rather than willpower mythology. He does not tell readers to try harder or download another app. He points to automation through repetition—the same commute, the same morning sequence, the same scheduled check-ins. This is where we find some friction with his argument. The piece acknowledges but understates a real tension: small businesses operate in environments of genuine unpredictability. Customer emergencies, supply chain disruptions, and cash flow crises do not respect routines. The risk of over-routinization is complacency blindness, the failure to notice when the environment has shifted enough to make the habit maladaptive. Markman hints at this with 'without causing problems,' but does not explore how operators should audit their routines for obsolescence.

The downstream effects of Markman's advice ripple into hiring, technology choices, and workplace culture. An operator who automates personal routines may extend the logic to their team—standardizing workflows, reducing employee discretion, building systems that minimize variation. This can boost efficiency and reduce errors, as evidenced by franchise models and lean manufacturing principles. It can also suppress the localized knowledge and adaptive improvisation that give small businesses competitive advantage over larger, more rigid competitors. The second-order question Markman leaves unaddressed: which decisions actually benefit from fresh deliberation versus habitual execution? Not all repetition is virtuous, and not all novelty is wasteful.

What to watch: whether Markman's forthcoming book, from which this piece is adapted, addresses the audit question—how to distinguish protective routine from calcified habit. For operators reading now, the actionable move is not total routinization but intentional triage. Map your recurring decisions by frequency and consequence. High-frequency, low-consequence choices are prime candidates for habituation: meal planning, email batching, meeting templates. Low-frequency, high-consequence decisions deserve protected calendar blocks and fresh cognition. The middle zone—recurring but consequential—demands the hardest call, and this is where most operators bleed energy without knowing it. Markman's framework is a starting point, not a complete system.

The piece cuts off mid-sentence, promising two additional strategies beyond habit formation. Based on Markman's published research, these likely involve environmental design and pre-commitment devices—structuring physical and social contexts to reduce temptation, and locking in choices before willpower enters the equation. Operators should seek the complete argument, but need not wait to act. The core principle stands: your daily cognitive budget is more constrained than your calendar suggests, and small businesses fail as often from accumulated micro-depletions as from single catastrophic choices. Protecting focus is not a luxury for the successful; it is a precondition of becoming so.

“You have a limited amount of daily energy to focus and get really good productive work done. You should spend that energy on things that matter rather than things that don't.” — Fast Company

Takeaway: Map your recurring decisions by frequency and consequence, then habituate the high-frequency, low-consequence ones to preserve fresh cognition for what actually moves the business.