Resources
Everything worth your time on the question: What actually happened, and what am I carrying forward?
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Annie Duke
If you regularly replay decisions after the event and tell yourself I should have known, start here.
Former professional poker player Annie Duke has spent years studying decisions under uncertainty. One of her most useful ideas is simple: don't judge the quality of a decision solely by what happened afterwards. A strong decision can produce a bad result. A weak decision can get lucky.
READ · RESEARCH
Daniel Kahneman, Barbara Fredrickson, Charles Schreiber and Donald Redelmeier
Short, and it will change how much you trust the sentence this year was a disaster.
The experiment that showed we judge an experience almost entirely by its most intense moment and how it ended, and barely at all by how long it lasted. Applied to a year, this is devastating: a bad December reliably rewrites eleven months you have not reconsidered since. It is the reason a review worth doing reconstructs the evidence before it decides what the year meant.
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Annie Duke
Best for deciding that the honest answer is to stop carrying it.
The counterweight to almost everything else written about avoidance. Duke argues that we are far better at persisting than at stopping, and that most of the cost of a bad commitment is paid after the point where we already knew. If the thing you keep postponing is something you have quietly decided against, this is the book that gives you permission to say so and a way to test whether you are right.
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Daniel Schacter
Best for knowing which parts of your recall to distrust.
Schacter catalogues the specific ways memory fails, including bias, the tendency to rewrite the past so that it agrees with how you feel today. That is exactly the failure mode of an annual review conducted from the armchair. Knowing the mechanisms makes it much easier to notice when you are remembering the year through the mood of the week you are in.
READ · BOOK
Daniel Kahneman
Why confidence and accuracy aren't the same thing.
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