I was standing at the fridge at 7:14am, door open, cold air on my face, and I could not decide what to put in my daughter’s lunchbox. Not in a cute “oh, the paradox of choice” way. In a total, brain-static, thousand-yard-stare way. My 5-year-old was asking me something about socks. My 3-year-old was crying because his banana broke. And I was looking at a fridge full of food, completely unable to make a single decision about any of it.

This happens to me more than I’d like to admit.

The thing about ADHD and decision-making is that it’s not really about the decisions themselves. It’s about the sheer volume. Every choice, no matter how small, takes something from you. And parenting is just this relentless conveyor belt of micro-decisions that starts the second you open your eyes and doesn’t let up until the last kid is asleep (and then you still have to decide what to watch on the couch, which, honestly, sometimes takes another 40 minutes).

Before 9am on a regular school day, I’ve already decided: when to get up, whether to shower now or later, what the kids are wearing, whether that shirt is clean enough (it’s not, but is it clean enough), what’s for breakfast, whether we have milk, whether I should go get milk, who gets dressed first, whether to fight the shoe battle now or later, where the school bag is, whether there’s a hat in it, if the lunchbox is clean from yesterday (it’s not), what goes in the lunchbox, whether the fruit is cut small enough, if there’s a note from the teacher I forgot to read, whether it’s library day, and whether I can park in that spot out the front or if it’s a clearway by now.

And that’s the stuff I remember. There’s probably another 50 decisions in there that happen so fast I don’t even register them.

For most people, I think, a lot of these run on autopilot. You just kind of… do them. But my brain doesn’t automate well. Each one gets processed like it’s a fresh problem to solve. Each one takes a tiny slice of focus. And by mid-morning, I’m cooked. Properly cooked.

There’s a term for it. Decision fatigue. It’s the idea that your ability to make good decisions gets worse the more decisions you make. It was originally studied in judges (they found that parole decisions got harsher as the day went on, which is terrifying but also very relatable if you’ve ever said “no” to dessert at 7pm purely because you had nothing left in the tank to evaluate the request).

For me, decision fatigue doesn’t just make my decisions worse. It makes me freeze. Or snap. Those are kind of the two modes. I either stand at the fridge unable to move, or I slam the lunchbox shut with whatever’s in there and say “it’s fine” in a voice that suggests it is not fine.

The thing that actually helped me, or started to, was reducing the number of decisions I had to make. Which sounds obvious, but it took me a while to see it. I started doing the same lunches on the same days. Monday is a sandwich, Tuesday is rice and something, Wednesday is wraps. It doesn’t matter that it’s boring. My kids don’t care. And even if they did, the alternative is me standing at the fridge like a broken robot, so boring wins.

This is actually why I built Just Tell Me What To Cook. It started because I could not handle the nightly “what’s for dinner” decision anymore. I would stand in the kitchen at 5pm, already depleted, trying to figure out what to cook with what we had, while simultaneously supervising bath time from the hallway and answering questions about why dogs don’t wear pants. I needed something that would just tell me. Not give me options. Not show me a Pinterest board. Just tell me what to make, right now, with what I’ve got.

I still have bad mornings. I still freeze. I still snap sometimes and then feel guilty about it later while I’m lying in bed replaying the moment. But I’ve gotten a little better at noticing when it’s happening. When I catch myself unable to decide something small, I try to recognise it as a symptom, not a failing. My brain’s not broken, it’s just out of budget for the day. Or the hour. Or, honestly, sometimes by 7:15am.

The banana is still broken, though. There’s no system for that one.