Black turtleneck, jeans model 501 of Levi’s and sports shoes from New Balance.

For more than a decade this has been the uniform of Steve Jobs in the vast majority of his public appearances.

As Isaacson biography “Steve Jobs” suggests, behind this eccentric stylistic choice, he hid the desire to create a look that is immediately recognisable by fans of Apple. But this is, however, not the only motivation. In 1998, Jobs ordered more than 100 blacks turtleneck identical, from the Japanese designer Issey Miyake, for a reason. And it is the same reason that Obama and Zuckerberg almost always wearing the same clothes.

Relations Between Making Decisions And Willing To Increase Willpower

I will propose you in a while three practical strategies that you have to follow if you want to increase willpower. It does not make sense, however, that you want to increase your willpower and you are still wasting it in trivial decisions.

Indeed, we are all subject to what is called “decision fatigue“. The “decision fatigue” is a concept well known in psychology and indicates the tendency of the human mind to make decisions worse and worse as the number of the same increases. In other words, there is a link between decisions and willpower: more choices we make, more our self-control deteriorates.

Professor Roy F. Baumeister compares our willpower to the battery of a smartphone. When we are well rested and fed, our willpower is at the highest level. Although this “mental battery” tends to discharge when a series of decisions occur (in scientific terms is called “ego depletion”).

Making a choice, even the most banal, has a “biological cost” indeed, and it consumes our mental energies.

This is why at the end of the day we tend to crash into the front of the TV (which could be wrong if it becomes a TV addiction), skip the workout in the gym or try some junk food with which to cram. And it is the same reason why successful people like Steve Jobs, Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg decided to reduce their wardrobe to a minimum.

Everyday wearing the same type of clothes is a way (extreme) to reduce the fatigue and keep intact the willpower to those crucial decisions to be taken by a CEO or a president.

Leaving aside these extreme strategies of Jobs & Co, in this last part of the article I would like to propose some practical and effective advices to reduce unnecessary decisions and to increase your willpower daily.

How to Reduce Unnecessary Decisions and Increase Willpower

When is our “battery” of willpower at the highest level? When we are well rested and fed.

The first technique that keeps intact our reserves of self-control is therefore to not to waste even a drop of it in the morning, when the “container” is full.

Being a morning person is the best thing you could ever imagine, and you need to adopt a series of behavioural routines and more. You can easily check how you should behave when you wake up, what exercises you can do in the morning to start the day better and change your life.

1) A Specific Morning Routine Will Improve Your Willpower

If you want to start the day with something extra, you absolutely have to minimize the decisions you make in the early 60 seconds of awakening:

Prepare the clothes you wear to work (or at university) before you go to bed.

you wear to work (or at university) before you go to bed. Decide in advance what to eat for breakfast .

. Avoid to respond to email or see social networks when you wake up (if you think you are having a bad habit, try to learn how to stop a bad habit).

If you then want to move to the next level, do not limit yourself to avoid futile decisions, but adopt a real morning routine, which will load your daily amount of energy. The best way to do this? Devote the first 60 minutes of your day to the so-called “holy Hour“.

Get FREE access to our tools! Get access to our collection of ebooks, checklists, cheatsheets and resources about Productivity, Personal Development and Time Management! Click here to access

2) Using A Checklist Will Help Your Willpower To Increase

Whatever is our job, we will always have to deal with a part of boring routine activities. These repetitive activities make us deciding every time exactly what to do, how we do it, etc.

In light of what we have seen so far, this is a waste of our mental energy.

How to avoid it ?! Using the checklist.

Define for all your routines a precise checklist (sequence of activities) of things to do. A to-do list. Write your checklist once and then forget about it, until you take it out when you will need to complete for the umpteenth time that administrative hassle.

And if you are a freelancer or an entrepreneur, remember that defining your checklist is the first crucial step to delegate these tasks to your employees.

3) Establish Your Meals

There is a close link between diet and willpower. As we saw, the decisions we make during the day tend to consume our physical energies. And try to guess at what level is our “mental battery” just before a meal? Below zero!

For this reason, even if we strive to follow our blessed diet, when we are hungry and we have to choose between a healthy salad or a heavy cheeseburger, our brain will automatically bias to the second. A great strategy to avoid this is to decide in advance our meals.

You have to choose your meals for the next 3-4 days and shop at the grocery store only and exclusively those meals. You will lose less time to do shopping, you will waste less money, and you will improve your health too. As a result, you will increase your willpower by doing these small practices.

Maybe you can think that living like this, planning every aspect of life, can be stressful or boring. There may be. But let me tell you briefly something that happened recently. We hate to feel trapped in the daily routine and for that we defend the freedom to make decisions rather futile, that give us an illusion of freedom, creativity and independence.

At the same time, without realizing it, we find ourselves constantly trapped in a life that is not ours, but we do not find the time and we do not have the mental energy to make the really important decisions that can revolutionize our lives.

No one wants you to wear the same thing everyday like Steve Jobs.

Test and implement the three strategies that I suggested (morning routine, checklist, meal planning), and you will see how this can certainly make you optimist about your decisions and your future.

Remind: If some things will not be for your case, you will have learned something new about yourself.

If, however, these small changes will be able to release at least a gram of the mental energy required to chase your more ambitious goals, well.. I’d say it will be worth it.

Who knows that in a few months you’ll start to think about who you really want to be in five years?

More importantly: you will have the necessary strength of will to become that person.

Other Resources: