One of my favorite movies is The Shawshank Redemption. In one scene, the main character wears dress shoes in prison, but nobody notices he’s not wearing his prison-issued shoes. It makes the point that people rarely pay attention to the details of a person’s clothing.
I’m reminded of that scene whenever I think of a productivity technique I first heard about with President Obama. (Disclaimer: This is not a political post and will not become one.) Regardless of your politics, you’ve probably seen at least one of President Obama’s speeches. Here’s a question for you: What color suit was he wearing? The answer: blue or gray.
That’s because President Obama only wears blue and gray suits. His reasoning has to do with something called decision fatigue. I first heard of this phenomenon from an article about the former president and his choice of clothing. When you’re the leader of the free world, you have a lot of decisions to make. The color of your suit isn’t nearly as important as world trade agreements and international markets. So, Mr. Obama limited his clothing decisions and spent some of that energy worrying about other things like foreign and domestic policy.
I thought the idea was intriguing, so I started to do it on a smaller scale. I wear mostly the same thing to work every day: khakis and a polo or long sleeve shirt. Most of the colors I pick are interchangeable – almost every shirt will match with either beige or blue khakis. This makes my morning run much more smoothly and frees up mental energy for the 1,500 decisions I’ll have to make in my classroom that day.