You've already made hundreds of decisions today. What to eat. What to wear. Which route to take. Whether to open that email now or later. Whether to keep reading this sentence.
So how many is that in a day? The number everyone quotes is 35,000.
Follow it backwards and it gets strange. The figure turns up in a 2016 Wall Street Journal column. Before that, in a 2015 post on a university leadership blog — which credited it to "various internet sources" and to a 2013 book on decision-making. People who have gone through that book report that the number isn't in it. That is where the trail stops. No dataset, no method, no paper.
The studies underneath it have not held up either.
The 226 decisions about food alone comes from a 2007 paper by Brian Wansink. Cornell later found he had committed academic misconduct, and many of his other papers were retracted — six of them by JAMA journals, after Cornell said it could not assure the results were valid.
Roy Baumeister's ego depletion — the idea that willpower drains from one limited tank — was tested in 2016 by 23 laboratories with 2,141 participants. They did not find the effect.
Then the courtroom study everyone repeats. A 2011 PNAS paper found Israeli judges granted parole 65% of the time early in a session and almost never just before a meal break. Other researchers showed the cases were not heard in random order: prisoners without lawyers tended to go last, and were less likely to be granted parole anyway. Later simulations concluded the effect, if real, is much smaller than reported.
Here is what is not in dispute.
Deciding takes effort. Attention fades. People are measurably worse at hard choices when they are tired, hungry or overloaded — that is ordinary experience and ordinary psychology. What has never been established is the tidy number, or the clean mechanism of a tank that empties.
Which makes the famous wardrobes harder to read than they look:
- Steve Jobs owned 100 identical black turtlenecks. He wore the same jeans and New Balance trainers daily. One fewer decision every morning.
- Mark Zuckerberg wears the same grey t-shirt. He said he wants to "make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community."
- Barack Obama only wore blue or grey suits as president. He explained: "I don't want to make decisions about what I'm eating or wearing, because I have too many other decisions to make."
- Albert Einstein is often said to have bought several identical grey suits to avoid thinking about clothes.
What is doing the work is the explanation bolted on afterwards — that each of them was protecting a measurable budget of choices. They may have been. They may also have just disliked shopping.
The next time you can't decide what to have for dinner at 8pm, you're not lazy. You're tired. Nobody can tell you how many decisions it took to get there.
Sources checked 25 September 2026·7 sources ↓