Producer Bennett Graebner on Protecting Your Decision-Making

Image Courtesy of Bennett Graebner

Somewhere along the way, Bennett Graebner found himself becoming part of nearly every wardrobe decision on the television show.

Should this contestant wear the blue dress or the red one? Was this jacket better than that one? Should everyone really avoid wearing white, or was that just old school production talk?

The questions came through emails, text chains, and even over breakfast, and at times they extended into visits to the show’s stylist to look at and discuss options in person. Individually, none of them took very long. Collectively, they consumed far more attention than they deserved.

Eventually, Graebner realized something: it didn’t really matter that much.

Sure, he had opinions. He generally preferred contestants not wear all white, and he liked it when people looked distinct from one another rather than dressed from the same catalog. But whether someone wore Outfit A or Outfit B almost never determined whether an episode succeeded. And there was a talented stylist whose job was to make those calls, so shouldn’t he ultimately trust that person’s opinion and let them do their job?

So he asked to be taken off the wardrobe emails. Other people made those decisions instead. Sometimes they chose differently than he would have. That was fine.

The decisions that mattered weren’t about clothes. They were the decisions that actually made the difference between a good episode and a great one. They were about people: what someone was going to say, what they were going to feel, what story was emerging that nobody could have possibly anticipated. Those were the decisions worth protecting his mental energy for.

That lesson stayed with him through nearly two decades producing more than 400 episodes of television. Good decision-making isn’t just about making better choices. It’s about deciding which choices deserve your attention in the first place.

Every Decision Has a Cost

Most people think about time as their most limited resource. Bennett Graebner came to believe that judgment is even scarcer.

Every decision draws from the same mental account. Some withdrawals are worth making. Others quietly leave you with less attention for the decisions that actually shape your day.

Research increasingly supports that intuition. Clinicians at the Cleveland Clinic describe decision fatigue as the mental depletion that follows a long run of choices. The symptoms are familiar to almost anyone: procrastination, impulsive decisions, brain fog, irritability, and the strange inability to make even simple choices after a long day.

Decision fatigue also differs from ordinary tiredness. A person can be physically fresh and decisionally spent, which is why the same professional who ran a sharp morning meeting stands in front of a takeout menu at seven unable to choose.

The problem isn’t that any one decision is particularly difficult. It’s that they accumulate.

The Hidden Cost of Small Decisions

Producing television means making hundreds of decisions every day. Some are genuinely important. Others simply feel important because they arrive in your inbox.

“In my business, so many decisions have to be made so quickly that I can’t afford to dwell on the ones that didn’t work out,” Graebner told the interview site IdeaMensch.

Graebner eventually realized those two categories aren’t the same. Some questions demand his experience and judgment. Others simply need someone to make a reasonable choice. Learning to distinguish between the two turned out to be one of the most valuable leadership lessons of his career.

Delegating isn’t about avoiding responsibility. It’s about protecting attention for the moments when it actually matters.

What Does the Research Say About Decision Fatigue?

Medicine offers one of the clearest demonstrations of what happens when decision-making wears down. Researchers led by Jeffrey Linder examined more than 21,000 primary care visits and found that doctors became increasingly likely to prescribe unnecessary antibiotics later in their clinic sessions. The patients hadn’t changed. The accumulated weight of making decisions had.

Hospitals supplied a second demonstration at even larger scale. Researchers tracking 13.7 million hand hygiene opportunities across 4,157 caregivers found that compliance fell by an estimated 8.7 percentage points from the start to the end of a typical 12-hour shift.

How many decisions a person makes in a day is a question without a trustworthy answer. A figure of 35,000 daily choices circulates widely online, but researchers have never traced it to an actual study, and the honest version is simply that the number is large enough to matter.

The lesson extends far beyond medicine. As judgment becomes depleted, people don’t suddenly become irrational. They simply begin choosing the easiest option instead of the best one.

How Bennett Graebner Protects the Decisions That Matter

Bennett Graebner eventually developed a few simple rules for himself:

• Delegate decisions that don’t require your unique experience.
• Create routines wherever the answer is almost always the same.
• Make the biggest decisions earlier in the day whenever possible.
• Resist treating every incoming question as equally important.

His own mornings ran on rails for exactly that reason. “Every day starts around 6AM with a four-mile run followed by an obscene amount of coffee,” he said in the same IdeaMensch interview, calling that hour the only time of day that felt like it belonged solely to him. A fixed routine spends no judgment, which leaves more of it for the decisions that do.

Cleveland Clinic’s clinicians add sleep and exercise to the same list, the maintenance costs of good judgment.

Former President Barack Obama described a similar philosophy when he explained why he wore only gray and blue suits during his presidency. The goal wasn’t fashion. It was preserving mental energy for decisions only he could make.

Bennett Graebner’s wardrobe story arrived at the same place from the opposite direction. Instead of simplifying his own clothing choices, he stopped spending time on everyone else’s.

The Decisions Only You Can Make

Leadership often gets described as making hard decisions. Graebner eventually came to think of it differently. Leadership is deciding which decisions deserve your attention.

Every organization has an endless supply of questions that feel urgent. Very few are actually important. The difficult part isn’t answering everything. It’s recognizing the handful of decisions that genuinely require your judgment and protecting enough mental bandwidth to make those well.

After nearly two decades producing television, Bennett Graebner’s biggest takeaway isn’t that decision fatigue is inevitable. It’s that attention is a finite resource. Spend it where only you can.