The One Actionable Guide You Need to Evaluate Your Decisions and Improve Your Judgement

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We make thousands of decisions everyday.

We decide so reflexively that it’s rare we stop to think about how we’re making our choices. What criteria are we weighing? What would a good or a bad outcome look like? What was the outcome last time? While most day-to-day decisions we make are small, our process for decision making impacts every element of our lives, professionally and personally.

I recently read “Thinking in Bets” by Annie Duke and in it she suggests practical tips for improving our decision making that I’ve begun applying in my own life and work.

The book highlights that good decisions are made when we have good processes. A good process means evaluating what we know, what we believe, how certain we are, and we weigh our options relative to the outcome we want to reach.

📘 My decision log

Examining and learning from mistakes is key.

Annie recommends a dispassionate review of our decisions to evaluate what we could have done better. For bigger decisions, I practice dissecting decisions from the past and making predictions about ones coming in the future.

I do this with a Decision Log. I created the template below motivated by Annie’s points. For each major decision, I record:

1. Decision: The decision itself, the date, and the type; personal, professional, etc.
2. Scenario: I describe the circumstances that led to the decision point.
3. Assumptions: List what I believe to be true about the scenario that influences my judgement and how certain I am.
4. Criteria: How will I make this decision? What factors are important to weigh?
5. Data: For example, if Criteria are “price” and “quality” then under Data I unpack the price and quality of different options.
6. Hypothesis: I write how I think the situation will turn out. If I’m reflecting on a past decision, I try to remember if I had a hypothesis beforehand.
7. Outcome [Post-decision]: After I make a choice, what happened?
8. Learnings [Post-decision]: What did I miss in my evaluation? What did I fail to see? I fill this out even if I was correct about the outcome.

📝 A real world example

Here’s a filled in example (with details removed/anonymized) that I used in a personal context regarding a man I was dating.

Decision: Dating John Doe, Date: April 2022, Type: Personal Romantic life

Scenario: John is the first person I’ve gone on an in-person date with after my last long-term relationship. He seemed cool from the get go. He’s a lawyer who recently discovered that religion wasn’t for him. I felt we had a lot in common. But there are some obvious red flags and I want to reflect on how I’m approaching this relationship.

Assumptions

• Before going into this relationship, I believed dating again would be hard. I felt 80% certain.
• I believed it would take a long time to find someone I really liked. 100% certain.

Criteria & Data

• Am I having fun? Yes! (TBH I’m probably giving this criteria more weight than it deserves)
• Is he kind? Yes.
• Is he emotionally mature? Kind of.
• Is he ready for a relationship? The data I have suggests maybe not. He has a lot going on in his personal life.

Hypothesis: Based on the data (particularly the “maybe not being ready for a relationship” datapoint) I’m going to take the risk and end the relationship before it goes too far and we both get too invested.

Outcome: [About a week later] I ended it. It happened in a quick midnight phone call after he ignored my calls and messages😓. It was more exhausting than it needed to be.

Learnings:

• I’ve started dating more and it isn’t that bad! I was 80% certain about this, and it was wrong!
• But, it does take a long time to find the right person (I was 100% certain and was right).
• If you see signs of indicating someone’s emotional maturity, trust them.
• Don’t stick around with the wrong person for too long if it seems like things aren’t developing. End things quickly when you see read flags.
• I didn’t realize how important the “is he ready?” criteria was until the big personal life factors started adding up. I should add that as a criteria for next time.

Going back and reviewing my past decisions, including my personal and professional ones, in this log every week or couple of weeks helps me clarify how I make decisions in a range of domains.

I can update my Criteria across similar decisions, learn to strengthen my Assumptions, and get better at gathering Data.

After keeping this up for months, I strongly encourage the practice to make sure you’re making the best decisions possible.