Ask AltoREAD · BOOK
How to Decide
Annie Duke
If you regularly replay decisions after the event and tell yourself I should have known, start here.
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Tool 20 · Develop yourself
What actually happened, and what am I carrying forward?
A guided 25 to 30 minutes conversation, here in TAIU. Not a gratitude list and not a goal audit. An account of the year, including the parts that never get recorded.
Describe the year without mentioning the last six weeks.
What disappears first is everything that became normal.
Consolidation is a legitimate description of a year. So is recovery. Neither needs a lesson attached.
What you'll look at
- 01What was happening early in the year
- 02What changed in the middle
- 03What ended
- 04What kept running the whole time
A note from Mark
Most people review a year the way they review a holiday. They remember the last part and one bad afternoon.
The thing that always goes missing is maintenance. A year in which somebody kept a business alive, held a family together and looked after somebody who was ill will be described as a year where nothing much happened, because none of it appears on a list of achievements.
I would also ask what ended. People keep good records of what they started. Almost nobody records what they let go of, and endings usually explain a year better than beginnings do.
Read my full view ↓
Some years are consolidation. That is a real answer and I would not dress it up as anything else.
And I would keep next year short. Two things you could answer yes or no to in twelve months are worth more than a page of intentions nobody will read again.
What you'll get
This will not sort you into a personality type.It will give you answers about your own life that you can test.
01
What actually happened
02
What changed
03
What you carried
04
What comes with you
+
Your TAIU handover: a summary of what the conversation found, written so you can take it with you.
See everything included ↓
- 01What you came here with
- 02What actually happened
- 03What changed
- 04What you did that you had not done before
- 05What was hard
- 06What you carried through it
- 07What you decided
- 08What ended
- 09Where your memory and the evidence diverge
- 10What you are still carrying
- 11What deserves protecting
- 12The credible alternative
- 13What the year appears to have been
- 14What, if anything, to change
- 15What remains unresolved
- 16Where this goes next
When you finish
Bring it back to your tree.
Your tree is where TAIU keeps a picture of your whole life, in parts like work, money and health.
This session works on the whole of you, not one part of your life. Nothing is scored. At the end, you are asked once which part of your life this touched most. You can answer none.
The conversation writes this summary for you. Keep the sheet, print it or paste it into My Tree. Nothing from the conversation is stored by TAIU.
- Session
- Date
- The part of life this belongs to
- What we found
- The alternative we tested
- What deserves protecting
- What should change, if anything
- Next actions
- What to notice or find out
- What remains unresolved
What now?
01 · Save it
A plain account of what actually happened, in rough order.
02 · Test it
Look at your calendar and your bank statements for the year before you decide what happened. They remember better than you do.
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What I would do
- 01
Reconstruct before interpreting. Walk the year in sections and gather events first.
- 02
Correct for recency deliberately. The last six weeks are not the year.
- 03
Count the maintenance. Most of a year is things carried rather than things achieved.
- 04
Record what ended. People account for what they started and rarely for what they let go.
- 05
Allow an ordinary conclusion. Consolidation and recovery are real results.
Test it
- 01
Try describing the year without mentioning the last six weeks.
- 02
Name three things that were difficult in March. If you cannot, that tells you something about the review you were about to write.
- 03
Ask somebody who was there what they remember, and see where their account differs.
The alternative
The expected outcome is a set of lessons and a plan. More often the useful finding is corrective. People remember years as wasted that contained an enormous amount of unrecorded work, usually because the work was maintenance rather than achievement. Others remember a good year and describe twelve months in which nothing they said mattered to them actually got any time. And some years are simply consolidation, which is a legitimate description of a year and not a euphemism for failure.
Think about this
- What was actually happening twelve months ago.
- What ended this year, including quietly.
- What became normal that was not normal before.
- What you kept running while everything else was going on.
- What you are carrying into next year whether you intended to or not.
Take this to Ask Mark
You have done the exercise. Now look again at what it found.
This looks at what you found and helps you understand it. It is not another exercise to repeat.
Take this to Ask Mark →Want to go further?
READ · RESEARCH
When more pain is preferred to less: the peak-end rule
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.
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READ · BOOK
Quit
Annie Duke
Best for deciding that the honest answer is to stop carrying it.
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Next tool
What stage am I in?
If the year felt like the end of something
Further thinking
When more pain is preferred to less: the peak-end rule
Daniel Kahneman, Barbara Fredrickson, Charles Schreiber and Donald Redelmeier
The Seven Sins of Memory
Daniel Schacter
The experience of regret: what, when and why
Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec
See the thinking ↓
Article
When more pain is preferred to less: the peak-end rule
Daniel Kahneman, Barbara Fredrickson, Charles Schreiber and Donald Redelmeier
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.
Book
The Seven Sins of Memory
Daniel Schacter
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.
Article
The experience of regret: what, when and why
Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec
Their finding is that regret over things we did fades, while regret over things we did not do tends to grow and to become more abstract as it does. Read it carefully though. The same abstraction is why inaction regret is easy to romanticise: the road not taken never has to survive contact with reality. Both halves of that are useful when deciding whether a want is worth acting on.
Book
The Top Five Regrets of the Dying
Bronnie Ware
A palliative nurse's account of what people said at the end, and the first regret on her list is having lived the life expected of them rather than the one they wanted. Treat it as testimony rather than evidence: it is a small, self-selected sample and it reads warmer than the research does. It earns its place because it is specific about the shape of a suppressed want, which the studies are not.