You Make 35,000 Decisions A Day – Rubbish!

I keep reading here and there that we make 35,000 decisions a day. That’s certainly gone up from the 1,500 decisions a day I’ve read elsewhere. Apparently, we make 226.7 decisions each day on just food alone.

35,000 seems like a huge number of decisions that not even an astronaut under stress would make.

So, where does this figure actually come from?

Err, out of fresh air it seems because there doesn’t seem to be any credible source for this number even though it is widely used just like in this Microsoft video:

And here’s another.

They aren’t the only ones. Here’s another one in which they say, “It has been said that every adult makes around 35,000 choices every single day.”

But let’s just think about this for a few moments.

As any KS2 pupil will tell you, there are 86,400 seconds in a day.

So, if we imagine that someone sleeps on average, 8 hours, that means we are awake for 57, 600 seconds. If we are making 35,000 decisions a day then that’s rather impressive because we are making a decision around every 1.5 seconds. Now, I don’t know about you but I don’t know anyone that is doing that. 

So this idea that we make 35,000 decisions a day is just fictitious. It’s a bit like the TeachThoughtStaff saying teachers make 1500 educational decisions a day and then following that up with “Not sure where the data comes from exactly, but it’s a number that makes sense – and may be even higher.”

Mother of God – we can’t just make up stuff and plant numbers in people’s minds for them to repeat.

We are all different and we simply cannot specify a number of daily decisions but it’s safe to say there won’t be many making 35,000 – this is a number with zero corroboration.