My Kale Salad Jeans

dropping balls and deciding once -- more ways to reduce decision fatigue

Last week, I wrote about my current hyper-fixation on kale salads. I felt pretty silly waxing rhapsodically about kale and how it has made my life a thousand times better over the last year but after posting, ya’ll said, “HEY ME TOO!!!!”

At the same time, I branched out for lunch and regretted it ENORMOUSLY.

Then, my mother-in-law came to visit for the weekend and we ate kale salad as part of a meal every day. She asked enough questions about the recipe and my methods that I feel confident she was a fan, too. Hyperfixation meals forever!

I think a big reason that the kale salad resonated with so many of you is that we’re all trying to simplify things! Adults with jobs have a lot going on. We have to feed ourselves, dress ourselves, use our brains at work all day, and maintain some semblance of a home to live in which requires various ongoing chores. That’s a lot! If you have a pet, children, a time or energy-intensive hobby, that’s even more! Just to exist in this modern world, we are all juggling so many balls. In order to survive (or perhaps, gasp, even thrive!?), we need to let some balls drop.

I am actively trying to figure out which of my balls I can drop — as you may have gathered by some of my recent writing:

Leaning into the Season

Hello to Here

My One Wild and Precious Life

Right now, I’m dropping the ball that holds “exciting and varied meal prep.” Leaning into my kale salad enables me to focus on juggling other balls — going on dates with my husband, learning to parent a toddler, getting enough sleep, running, reading for pleasure, surviving the daily grind.

Decide once

Another way to think about this is with The Lazy Genius principle of “decide once". I don’t think Kendra created this principle but I love how she frames it and has made it attainable for me. The idea is to make a single decision about some element of your life and stick with that decision until it no longer serves you. Whenever you come to that decision point, you don’t have to use your brain because you’ve already made the decision! When I come to lunch, I don’t need to use my brain because I’ve already decided on my kale salad.

Various sources say that the average person makes ~35,000 decisions every single day. It seems prudent to do what we can to reduce that number and save some brain power, even just a little bit.

Another way I am deciding once is with my clothes.