Founders make an estimated 35,000 decisions a day, and decision fatigue makes checking an app the easiest one to say yes to. Fella blocks distracting apps by default and gives you one 5-minute emergency unlock per session, one less decision to make.
Trusted by 500+ people
Running something yourself means making an enormous number of decisions, and most of them aren't the ones that matter. Estimates put founder decision volume as high as 35,000 choices in a day, compared to roughly 35 genuinely significant decisions a typical Fortune 500 CEO makes. The other 34,965 are operational noise, small enough to not register individually but heavy enough, in total, to drain the mental energy needed for the decisions that actually move the business.
That drain is decision fatigue, and it doesn't announce itself as tiredness. It shows up as delayed responses to simple choices, mental fog, irritability, and a specific pattern researchers point to directly: founders procrastinating on high-stakes decisions while obsessing over minor ones. Every week spent procrastinating is estimated to waste around 60 hours of cognitive capacity that could have gone toward the business.
Fake work is activity that feels productive without actually moving anything forward: checking analytics for the third time today, browsing industry news, scrolling a competitor's app "for research." It's a specific, well-disguised form of avoidance, because unlike obvious procrastination, it comes with a story attached about why it's technically part of the job.
Successful founders describe deliberately cutting anything that doesn't directly bring in money or improve the core product. Checking an app rarely passes that test, but it's the path of least resistance whenever the actual task in front of you is hard, ambiguous, or high-stakes enough to trigger avoidance.
Decision fatigue doesn't distribute evenly across a day's choices. It tends to hit hardest exactly when a decision is most consequential, hiring, pricing, a difficult conversation, because those decisions demand the most mental energy at the moment you have the least of it left. Checking a distracting app in that moment isn't laziness, it's the brain routing around a decision it doesn't have the capacity to make well right now.
Systems that decide for you in advance are the standard advice for founders managing this, batching decisions, setting rules instead of re-deciding daily. An app blocker is a version of the same idea applied narrowly: the decision to avoid distracting apps gets made once, during setup, instead of being re-litigated every time willpower runs low.
Screen Time limits and self-imposed rules ask you to make one more decision, whether to override the limit, every time you're tempted. For someone already navigating 35,000 decisions a day, that's exactly the wrong kind of tool. It adds a decision instead of removing one.
Fella blocks selected apps by default using Apple's Screen Time framework, so there's no daily choice to make about whether blocking is on. one 5-minute emergency unlock per session covers a genuine need, and it locks itself back up automatically, no override to consider, no willpower spent deciding.
1. Block the apps that pass as "research." Social media, news, and competitor-browsing apps are the common culprits. For a broader look at available tools, see our iPhone app-blocking options.
2. Let the block hold through the whole day. No decision to make about whether today's an exception.
3. Use the emergency unlock for something real. One 5-minute window per session, not a status check.
4. The apps lock again automatically. One fewer decision on a day that already has 34,999 too many.
Everything you need to stay focused, right from Home.
Estimates put founder decision volume at up to 35,000 choices a day, the vast majority of it low-stakes operational noise rather than the roughly 35 significant decisions a typical Fortune 500 CEO makes daily.
Decision fatigue depletes mental energy over the course of a day, and researchers note that founders under fatigue often delay high-stakes calls while getting stuck perfecting low-stakes details, a pattern linked to avoidance rather than priority.
Fake work is activity that feels productive, checking analytics, scrolling industry news, browsing a competitor's app, without moving the business forward. It's a common form of avoidance for entrepreneurs facing a harder, higher-stakes task.
Fella blocks distracting apps on your iPhone by default, with one 5-minute emergency unlock per session. It removes the easiest form of fake work, opening a distracting app, without requiring a decision every time.
Yes. Employees typically have a narrower decision scope defined by their role, while founders face unstructured decisions across every part of the business, which compounds fatigue faster over the course of a day.
It depends on whether checking them repeatedly changes anything. If refreshing an analytics app several times a day doesn't lead to a different action, it functions the same as fake work and is worth including in the block list.
