What Is Decision Fatigue, and How Do CEOs Beat It?

Decision fatigue is the depletion that comes from making countless small choices all day. For CEOs it is one of the most energy-expensive parts of the job, and AI tools have quietly made it worse: the tools generate more options faster than any human can evaluate them. The fix is the Decision Protection Protocol.

Why did AI make decision fatigue worse?

A CFO I write about in the book, Marcus, adopted AI faster than his peers. Reports that took two days took twenty minutes. He gained ninety minutes a day and ended up working later than ever, reviewing AI-generated scenarios nobody had even proposed. He had automated the easy parts and filled the space with more of the hard parts. The tools got faster. His cognitive capacity did not. I call it the automation trap.

What is the Decision Protection Protocol?

A systematic way of deciding what deserves your attention. The core move is decision batching: group similar decisions and handle them in fixed blocks instead of scattering them across the day. Klaus batched personnel decisions into Tuesday mornings, client decisions into Thursdays, operations into Monday reviews. Marcus put all financial approvals on Wednesdays. The rest of their weeks stopped being interrupted by choices that could wait.

Where do you start?

Count your interruptions for two days. Every time someone brings you a decision, note it. Most CEOs find that 70 percent of what reaches them could be batched, delegated, or decided once as a rule. Then pick one category, give it a weekly slot, and tell your team the new rule. One category is enough to feel the difference.

The full protocol sits inside the Personal Sustainability quadrant of the Whole Human Framework, alongside Energy Architecture Design. Both are in The Whole Human Leader (Wiley, 2026), and both are early work in any coaching engagement with me.