

Too many choices -- good or bad -- can be mentally exhausting - rantfoil
http://www.physorg.com/news127404469.html

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smalter
one trick to avoid exhaustion from too many choices: short circuit when you
get a satisfactory outcome, even if it's not optimal. e.g., ordering food at a
restaurant or watching tv, if i find a menu item or a program that's good
enough and the outcome is not too important to me (those are the cases you
should invest extra mental energy to find optimal solutions), i stop scanning
there.

the general notion is that your mental energy is valuable currency and should
be invested in ways that give you good return.

~~~
yters
I have a ball of sticky tape, and I choose whatever it sticks too.

------
jeroen
Barry Schwartz claims that choice makes us feel miserable. A very interesting
TED talk, see: <http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/93>

~~~
asdflkj
He does a great job of outlining the problem, but the only solution he
suggests is spectacularly wrong. He says that redistribution of income will
make us (those with "too much" income) happier because it will narrow our
choices. But it won't. The great thing about money is that you can buy
anything with it, including the reduction in number of choices. The cachet for
many companies (e.g. Apple, Costco) is exactly that: consistently high quality
and limited selection. And it always costs extra.

My biggest motivation for getting rich is not having to deal with
insignificant (but unavoidable if you're poor) everyday problems. Being forced
to choose is mostly a subset of those problems.

------
yummyfajitas
Of course, one should not use such research as an excuse to _eliminate_
choices (as many political types believe). All you need to do is _hide_ the
other choices.

A great example of this is the choice of "Desktop or server?"

<http://www.ubuntu.com/>

In fact, that's barely even a choice. But if you want to choose between other
options, you can (at the cost of an extra click):

<http://www.ubuntu.com/products/>

In my view, this is the proper way to deal with too many choices.

