By Stephanie Wilkie, Knowledge Translation Strategist with BC Behavioural Insights Group
Photo by No Revisions on Unsplash
I’m toying with the idea of wearing a uniform. You may be thinking of medical scrubs, police uniforms, or soccer kits, but I’m not talking about that type of uniform. I mean ‘uniform’ in the sense of limiting my options for what to wear during my workweek. There are two ways to approach this: one is to wear copies of the same shirt and pants every weekday, another is to embrace a capsule wardrobe. But as someone for whom fashion is a passion, why would I consider doing this?
Years ago, I saw a TV segment on Matilda Kahl, an art director who wore the same shirt and pants to work every day. My initial reaction was disapproval – why would someone limit one of the most apparent displays of creativity? As I watched, my initial sentiment subsided. Kahl’s reason for wearing the same thing to work every day was to reduce the amount of time spent stressing about this decision. Some years before, Barack Obama chose to alternate the same two colours of suits during his presidency for the same reason. It turns out there are more important decisions occupying the time of a creative and a world leader. My experiment would be for the same reasons – to reserve mental energy for other decisions throughout the day.
Photo source: http://unarmarioverde.es/wardrobes/
You might have heard of decision fatigue, which is the phenomenon whereby our decision-making abilities become weakened over time and/or with the volume of decisions faced. In most cases, we want to make decisions that are in our best interests. When smaller, more trivial decisions crowd our cognitive landscape, we have less energy and focus to make the important decisions that matter.
Although questions like, “What will I wear today?”, are relatively small and easy, when we add them up day after day, they become quite large, and, in fact, account for a not insignificant part of how we spend our lives. With this in mind, I think that we would do ourselves a service to at least examine how we make these choices. For me, I'm taking it a step further and examining if I really want to make these choices every day. Instead, I may want to make some bigger choices to reduce how many small choices I need to make each day, which may free some mental energy to grapple with larger issues and allow me to be more intentional with my attention and time.
So, wish me luck as I explore going uniform! I’ll be researching stylish yet interchangeable clothing items for my professional environment and taking them out for a test run. While it’s not a proper randomized controlled trial, it will certainly be an experiment of sorts for me. If this endeavour feels successful, perhaps I’ll try some other methods for reducing decision fatigue: a morning/evening routine, scheduling reminders or prompts for household chores, or—the bane of my existence—meal prep.