You sit down to work. You have things to do. You know roughly what they are.
And then twenty minutes pass while you decide which one to start.
By the time you finally pick something, you're tired. Not from the work, from the choosing. The actual task starts at a deficit.
Why Choosing Costs More Than It Should
Decision-making draws from the same cognitive resource pool as sustained work. Roy Baumeister and colleagues documented this in their research on ego depletion: the mental effort of making choices depletes the same capacity you need to actually do the work. This is why judges give harsher sentences before lunch, and why your willpower tends to be strongest in the morning.
When your tasks all feel equally important, the brain has no anchor. It evaluates and re-evaluates instead of committing, because committing means accepting that the other options were left behind. This is what Barry Schwartz calls the paradox of choice: more options don't improve outcomes, they increase the cost of deciding.
The result is what researchers call decision fatigue before task engagement, you arrive at the work already depleted, not from anything you've done, but from the overhead of getting there.