Mentavo
There are weeks where little happens and you're worn out anyway.
The task list is manageable, the meetings went fine, nothing went wrong. What's missing is an explanation for the tiredness.
Part of it often isn't on any list: three to five questions that have been open for weeks. The move. The conversation that should happen. The request you still haven't answered.
Those questions consume attention, including at the times you aren't thinking about them.
How this differs from an open task
An open task has a state: not started, started, done. It can be delegated, postponed, broken into parts.
An open decision has no such state. It's either made or it isn't, and in between there's no progress – only occupation.
That's why thinking about a decision so rarely feels like getting somewhere: it isn't. You spend time on a question and end up in the same place afterwards, with less energy.
Why the cost stays invisible
Undecided questions appear in no calendar. They have no duration and no location. Only their result is visible – or its absence.
Their cost accrues in small portions: on waking, in the supermarket queue, in the gap between two meetings. Each portion is too small to notice. Added up, they explain a decent share of the tiredness that can't be traced back to work.
It's related to the mechanism described in the piece on the invisible mental load of everyday life – that one is about continuous remembering, this one about continuous re-evaluating.
The quiet duplicated effort
The most expensive pattern with open decisions is re-opening them without new information.
You go through the arguments, arrive at the same stalemate, put the subject down. Two days later the same pass begins again – not because anything changed, but because a trigger came past: a message, a conversation, a quiet moment.
Each pass costs roughly the same and yields roughly as little. For a decision left open for six weeks, twenty full deliberations add up easily.
Doing that arithmetic once makes it clearer why certain decisions were so disproportionately exhausting in hindsight – even though the deciding itself took ten minutes.
The decision inventory
The exercise takes about fifteen minutes and seems unremarkable until you actually do it.
Part one: write down every question currently open. Not just the big ones. Also: whether to switch providers, whether to say yes to the party, whether to repair the bike or replace it.
Most people end up with six to twelve items. They expected two or three.
Part two: give every line one of four marks.
| Mark | Meaning | What follows |
|---|---|---|
| A | All the information needed is already here | Decide now, not later |
| B | Exactly one piece of information is missing | Getting it becomes a task with a date |
| C | Depends on other people or dates | Set a day to follow up |
| D | Already decided internally | Say it or do it |
The insight is almost always in the distribution: very few lines are B. Most are A or D.
The category nobody expects
D is the most uncomfortable and the most common.
These are the questions where the answer has been settled for weeks – recognizable by the fact that one option brings immediate relief while the other has you looking for an argument.
What's open here isn't the decision, it's its consequence: the conversation, the refusal, the resignation, other people's reactions.
That matters, because thinking is useless in these cases. No new insight is coming. What's missing isn't an argument, it's an action that takes some nerve.
When it isn't information, but the loss in the way
Every decision ends possibilities. For some questions that's precisely what's causing the delay.
As long as nothing is decided, both futures remain available in a sense. After the decision one of them is permanently gone – and the rejected version then often looks better than it would have been day to day. That aftermath is covered in the piece on the space between a decision and certainty.
A sober test: if a new piece of information wouldn't change where you already stand, the question isn't open because something is missing. It's open because the end of the options is unpleasant.
The distinction doesn't reduce the weight of the decision. It only stops you searching for information that isn't there.
Leaving it open on purpose – with a date
Some questions should stay open. An offer you want to wait out. A change that only makes sense in spring.
The difference between a deliberately open question and a smoldering one is a single entry: a date when it gets looked at again.
Without that date, the question keeps announcing itself unprompted. With it, the question has a place – and many people find it shows up markedly less often in between.
In Mentavo, items like these can be stored with a date and reappear on the day in question, together with the note you wrote at the time. The practical effect is less the reminder than the permission not to think about it until then.
Questions for sorting
- Which decision have I run through more than three times in the past fortnight?
- What information would actually change where I stand – and when do I get it?
- Which option brings immediate relief before I start justifying anything?
- What exactly am I flinching from: the choice, or its consequence?
What this article doesn't claim
Deciding fast isn't automatically better. Some questions are best left to wait, and some decisions genuinely need to mature.
Nor does the piece claim that all exhaustion comes from unresolved questions. Tiredness has many causes, physical ones included.
If decisions block you persistently, come with strong tension, or restrict everyday life, a professional is a better person to talk to than another round of weighing up.
Conclusion: the relief is in ending it, not in deciding
Undecided questions rarely cost energy where you'd expect. The choice isn't expensive. The weeks beforehand are, when the same deliberation starts over twenty times.
An inventory doesn't solve hard questions. It only shows how many are running at once – and how many of them aren't questions any more.
For most people the relieving part isn't deciding better. It's that three items out of ten simply disappear.
