You make about 35,000 decisions every single day. That is the number researchers at Cornell University landed on, and for a high-performing leader, it might actually be conservative.
It starts before you even get out of bed. Check email now or after coffee? Wear the blue suit or the grey one? Take the call from the car or get to the office early? By the time you sit down at your desk at 9am, you have already burned through a significant portion of your daily cognitive fuel.
And that is the problem. Decision making is not a limitless resource. It is biological. Every choice you make consumes glucose. It depletes your neurotransmitters. It physically exhausts the neural pathways in your prefrontal cortex. This is not about willpower or discipline. It is chemistry.
When that tank runs dry, you do not just get tired. You get stupid.
Researchers call this "ego depletion," but you know it as that fog that rolls in around 3pm. The inability to focus on a complex contract. The irritability with your team. The urge to just say "yes" to get a decision off your plate, even if it is the wrong one.
The High Cost of Low-Value Choices
The real danger for executives is not the big strategic decisions. It is the thousands of micro-decisions that bleed you dry before you ever get to the big ones.
Think about your average Tuesday.
You spend ten minutes going back and forth on a meeting time. You spend twenty minutes deciding which flight option makes the most sense for the conference. You filter through fifty emails, deciding for each one: delete, archive, reply, or defer? You chose what to order for lunch. You approved a minor expense report.
None of these decisions required your specific expertise. None of them leveraged your years of experience or your strategic vision. But every single one of them cost you the exact same amount of biological fuel as deciding on a new hire or approving a budget.
Your brain does not distinguish between "important" and "trivial" when it comes to the chemical cost of deciding. It just burns the fuel.
This is why you feel shattered by the end of a day where you "didn't do anything real." You did. You made thousands of invisible, low-value choices that robbed you of the capacity to make the high-value ones.
The Admin Trap
We see this with every new client who walks through our doors. They are brilliant, capable, driven leaders who are drowning in logistics.
They believe that doing their own scheduling is "easier" than explaining it to someone else. They think booking their own travel gives them "control." They handle their own inbox because they want to stay "in the loop."
This is a trap.
Admin is pure decision volume. It is a relentless stream of binary choices — yes/no, this/that, now/later. It is the cognitive equivalent of death by a thousand cuts.
When you handle your own logistics, you are voluntarily spending your most limited resource — your decision-making energy — on tasks that generate zero return on investment. You are paying for a flight with the currency you should be saving for your company's future.
The Executive Who Does Less, Better
The most effective leaders we work with have realized something profound: delegation is not a convenience. It is a cognitive strategy.
They do not delegate to save time. They delegate to save their brains.
They understand that their value to their organization lies in a very small number of very high-stakes decisions. Their job is to protect their capacity to make those decisions well.
That means ruthlessly eliminating everything else.
They do not decide when to meet. They say, "Get on my calendar," and trust that the system will handle it.
They do not decide which flight to take. They say, "I need to be in London by Tuesday evening," and trust that the logistics will be optimized for their preferences.
They do not filter their own email. They only see the messages that actually require their input.
By removing these thousands of micro-decisions, they arrive at the big moments — the board meeting, the negotiation, the crisis response — with a full tank. They are sharp. They are present. They are patient.
What You Get Back
When we implement this kind of system for a client, the change is visceral.
We had a founder recently who told us he felt "guilty" for how much free time he suddenly had. He wasn't working less. He was just working on the things that mattered.
He stopped waking up to an inbox full of noise. Instead, he saw a curated list of three things that needed his attention. The noise had been filtered, filed, or handled before he even opened his eyes.
He stopped spending his Sunday nights planning his week. He walked into Monday morning with a briefing document that told him exactly where he needed to be and why.
He stopped feeling that 3pm crash. He had energy for his team in the late afternoon. He had patience for his kids when he got home.
He reclaimed his brain.
The Human + AI Advantage
This is where the modern approach to executive support changes the game. In the past, you needed a small army of staff to achieve this level of filtering. Today, we use a hybrid model that is faster, smarter, and more reliable.
AI is the ultimate filter. It can process volume that no human can match. It can sort, tag, and route thousands of inputs in seconds. It handles the patterns.
The human element provides the judgment. Your dedicated RPM partner understands context. They know that "urgent" means something different coming from your biggest investor than it does from a cold sales pitch. They know that you prefer window seats on red-eyes but aisles on day flights.
The AI filters the noise. The human acts on the signal. You decide only what requires your unique judgment.
This means the routine decisions never even reach you. They are handled by a system that knows your preferences better than you do.
A Challenge
So here is a question for you.
What would your day look like if 200 fewer decisions hit your desk tomorrow?
What if you didn't have to decide when to meet, what to eat, how to get there, or who to reply to?
What if you could save all that cognitive fuel for the work you were actually hired to do?
You don't need more time. You need more capacity. And the only way to get it is to stop spending it on things that don't matter.
Every decision you don't make is a victory. It is energy saved for something better. It is a second refined.
Stop choosing. Start leading.