Decide once to go out for pancakes the night before the first day of school. And if everyone digs it, do it again the next year. Decide once that you’ll spend Christmas Eve looking at Christmas lights in your pajamas, and then pile in the car.

Instead, decide once. Choose now what you’ll get every teacher for every occasion. For Christmas, I give a book.*3

and he and my daughter are watching television because I’m tired of talking to them. I haven’t showered in a couple of days,

Make the Same Meal When You Have People Over Inviting new people over can feel scary, so make it easier by offering the same meal each time. Choose a crowd-pleasing recipe you feel confident making, and always serve it the first time someone comes to your home. Now you can enjoy being hospitable rather than stressing out over what to have or how it

What’s important, then, is to make good fixed decisions—ones that will add value to your life instead of taking value from it. Decide once, on purpose, about everything, from the items in your closet to what’s on your calendar. A single, intentional decision relieves your brain of effort, freeing you to think about what matters to you instead of li

expert at creating systems to finish tasks.

While my actions weren’t always a direct correlation to his, I lived as if they were.

I stopped caring and I stopped trying, and somehow I still felt tired. Little did I know you can be just as exhausted from not trying as you can from trying too hard. Managing apathy and survival mode takes as much energy as managing rules and perfection.

You and I and the pretty stranger at Target all have stories that keep us trying hard at the wrong things, and the harder we try, the stronger the lie.