What actually tires people is choosing, not doing

The work is rarely the heavy part, and it is worth being honest about where the weight sits.

Watch somebody put off a fifteen minute task for three days and it is tempting to conclude they find the task unpleasant. Often they do not. Ask them afterwards and they will say it was fine, it took no time, they do not know why they left it. What was heavy was not the doing. It was the carrying: the repeated arrival of the item in their attention, the repeated weighing of whether now was the moment, the small negative charge that built up around it each time it was considered and deferred. The task cost fifteen minutes. The deferral cost considerably more, spread thinly across seventy two hours.

This is why a full day of demanding but structured work can leave a person less depleted than a lighter day spent deciding what to do. Structure does not reduce effort, it reduces the overhead attached to effort. A schedule that tells you what happens next is doing real work on your behalf, and the fact that this work is invisible is exactly why people undervalue it and dismantle their structures at the first opportunity, usually in the name of freedom.

The practical version of this is to look for the places where you are choosing repeatedly and to close as many of them as you reasonably can. What is for dinner on a weeknight. Which shirt. Which task first. Which route. None of these choices are important, and that is the point: unimportant choices are the ones most worth eliminating, because they carry the same overhead as important ones while returning almost nothing. Reserve the deciding for things that actually differ from one instance to the next.