Coaching practices for How to Review Past Decisions
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For How to Review Past Decisions, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I started writing my decisions down but I never actually go back to close the loop
- I beat myself up over a call that went badly even though it was reasonable with what I knew, and I pat myself on the back for a reckless one that happened to work
- Every time I review how I acted today I catch myself building a defense
- After the fact I can never honestly reconstruct what I was actually thinking when I chose
- When something goes badly I’ll pick it apart for hours, but when something actually goes great I just enjoy it and move on without a second thought
Practices that may help
- Run a weekly decision review session
Set aside 20 minutes each week to score past decisions and extract one lesson.
Decision Journaling: Learning to Decide Better Over Time - Score decision quality separately from outcome quality
Judge the process you used — not whether it worked — when you review a past decision.
Decision Journaling: Learning to Decide Better Over Time - Seneca’s evening court — judge the day as an honest prosecutor
Review the day as a fair judge would: what was the evidence, what was the verdict, what is the sentence?
The Pythagorean Evening Review - Log the decision before the outcome
Write what you decided, why, and what you expect — before you know how it turns out.
Decision Journaling: Learning to Decide Better Over Time - Apply the AAR to successes, not only setbacks
Reviewing what actually caused a win produces replicable insight; reviewing only failures produces only loss-avoidance.
After-Action Review: The US Army’s Tool for Continuous Learning - The three-question evening review
Ask three questions before sleep: What did I do wrong? What did I succeed at? What could I have done better?
The Pythagorean Evening Review - Gather raw material before reflecting
Pull the data — calendar, photos, notes, emails — before you begin reflecting, so memory does not do all the work.
The Annual Review (Tim Ferriss Method) - Decision Journaling: Learning to Decide Better Over Time
A decision journal is a written record of significant decisions — what you decided, why, what you expected to happen, and what actually happened. It counteracts hindsight bias and outcome bias by preserving your actual reasoning before the outcome arrives, and it creates the only feedback loop that produces real calibration: comparing your predictions to results across many decisions over time. - End every review with a single resolved next action
The review is incomplete until you name one specific thing you will do differently tomorrow.
The Pythagorean Evening Review - The evening reckoning (examen)
Audit the day’s actions against your stated intentions — without self-punishment, just honest seeing.
The Stoic Daily Review
Related concerns
- Decision Journaling Learning To Decide Better Over Time Before Bed
A decision journal is a written record of significant decisions — what you decided, why, what you expected to happen, and what actually happened. It counteracts hindsight bias and outcome bias by preserving your actual reasoning before the outcome arrives, and it creates the only feedback loop that produces real calibration: comparing your predictions to results across many decisions over time.
- Decision Journal
A decision journal is a written record of significant decisions — what you decided, why, what you expected to happen, and what actually happened. It counteracts hindsight bias and outcome bias by preserving your actual reasoning before the outcome arrives, and it creates the only feedback loop that produces real calibration: comparing your predictions to results across many decisions over time.
- Decision Journal Before Outcome
A decision journal is a written record of significant decisions — what you decided, why, what you expected to happen, and what actually happened. It counteracts hindsight bias and outcome bias by preserving your actual reasoning before the outcome arrives, and it creates the only feedback loop that produces real calibration: comparing your predictions to results across many decisions over time.
- Decision Journaling Learning To Decide Better Over Time After A Loss
A decision journal is a written record of significant decisions — what you decided, why, what you expected to happen, and what actually happened. It counteracts hindsight bias and outcome bias by preserving your actual reasoning before the outcome arrives, and it creates the only feedback loop that produces real calibration: comparing your predictions to results across many decisions over time.
- Decision Journaling Learning To Decide Better Over Time At Work
A decision journal is a written record of significant decisions — what you decided, why, what you expected to happen, and what actually happened. It counteracts hindsight bias and outcome bias by preserving your actual reasoning before the outcome arrives, and it creates the only feedback loop that produces real calibration: comparing your predictions to results across many decisions over time.
- Decision Journaling Learning To Decide Better Over Time During Conflict
A decision journal is a written record of significant decisions — what you decided, why, what you expected to happen, and what actually happened. It counteracts hindsight bias and outcome bias by preserving your actual reasoning before the outcome arrives, and it creates the only feedback loop that produces real calibration: comparing your predictions to results across many decisions over time.
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