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TAIU

The obvious option is rarely the only one. Write the ones you have not said out loud.

Sets the obvious option beside the ones that have not been said out loud.

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Attention Span

Gloria Mark

Read this before you buy another app to fix your concentration. The evidence points at the environment you are working inside, not at your character.

Mark has measured what people actually do at a computer for twenty years, rather than what they report doing. The average uninterrupted stretch on one screen has fallen from around two and a half minutes to under fifty seconds, and roughly half of the interruptions are self generated. Her argument is that attention is shaped by design, rhythm and workload before it is shaped by willpower.

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Clear Thinking

Shane Parrish

Particularly useful if you know you make decisions quickly when angry, excited, frightened or under pressure.

Parrish's work is less about finding clever frameworks and more about recognising the moments when our instincts take control before we've properly thought.

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How to Decide

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.

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How to Make Hard Choices

Ruth Chang

Watch this if you've created increasingly elaborate spreadsheets and still can't choose.

Some choices are difficult because there isn't an objectively correct answer. Chang asks us to consider something different: who do I want to become?

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The Paradox of Choice

Barry Schwartz

Read this if you cannot leave a decision alone once it has been made, or if good enough has never felt like a real answer.

Schwartz separates maximisers, who need to be sure they have the best available option, from satisficers, who stop once something is good enough. The uncomfortable finding is that maximisers tend to end up with objectively better outcomes and feel worse about them, because every choice carries the shadow of the one they did not take.

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Working Identity

Herminia Ibarra

Read this if you have been reflecting on the same possible change for two years and have never once tried a small version of it.

Ibarra followed people through major career and identity change and found that almost none of them thought their way to an answer first. They acted first, in small reversible experiments, and their sense of who they were caught up afterwards. It is the strongest available argument against sitting still until you feel certain.

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One-way doors and two-way doors

Jeff Bezos

Why reversible decisions should often be made faster.

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Superforecasting

Philip Tetlock & Dan Gardner

How to think in probabilities instead of pretending certainty exists.

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The Premortem

Gary Klein

Imagine you've already failed. Now explain why.

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The Psychology of Human Misjudgment

Charlie Munger

How incentives and predictable human tendencies distort judgement.

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Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman

Why confidence and accuracy aren't the same thing.