Coaching practices for Planning Calibration
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Planning Calibration, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I make calls about how things will go all the time, but I never write them down or check them after
- I’m late on something, I shrug, update the calendar, and immediately forget I ever thought it’d take half as long
- My real decisions take months to resolve and matter too much for me to score them honestly, so I never get clean reps
- There’s one area I consider myself an expert in, and that’s exactly where I’m most stubbornly sure and most often wrong
- When I say I’m eighty percent sure I genuinely don’t know if that means anything
Practices that may help
- Calibration Training
Calibration training teaches you to match your stated confidence levels to your actual accuracy: if you say "70% confident," roughly 70% of those claims should turn out to be correct. Tetlock’s forecasting research and probability training studies show calibration is trainable with practice and feedback — the evidence here is specific and replicable. - Score your own past predictions to calibrate your outside-view use
Keep a forecast log and score it — you cannot improve calibration without feedback on where you were over- or under-confident.
The Outside View - Log actual vs. estimated time for every task
Build a personal database of your own estimation errors so you can calibrate future predictions.
The Planning Fallacy — Why Your Estimates Are Always Wrong - Build calibration reps with low-stakes trivia and almanac questions
Use factual trivia questions as a practice ground for calibration — outcomes resolve immediately and the stakes are zero.
Calibration Training - Calibration practice
Predict your performance before each retrieval test, then compare prediction to outcome.
Self-Regulated Learning: Taking Control of How You Learn - Identify the specific domains where you are most overconfident
Calibration is domain-specific — find where your confidence most exceeds your accuracy.
Calibration Training - Calibrated Questions, Made Practical
Calibrated questions are open "How" and "What" questions that hand the other party a problem to solve, letting you steer a negotiation or difficult conversation without commands or ultimatums. The technique comes from Chris Voss’s FBI hostage-negotiation work; its mechanism is grounded in autonomy psychology, though the specific scripts are practitioner craft rather than a lab-validated protocol. - Practice calibration by tracking your confidence predictions
Your "80% confident" beliefs should come true about 80% of the time — check that they do.
Bayesian Thinking: How to Update Beliefs Rationally - Maintain a scored prediction log
Record predictions with explicit probabilities and score them when they resolve.
Calibration Training - Practice probability calibration
Regularly make probabilistic predictions and track your accuracy across many of them.
Hindsight Bias: Why Everything Seems Obvious in Retrospect
Related concerns
- Calibration Control Classification
Calibration training teaches you to match your stated confidence levels to your actual accuracy: if you say "70% confident," roughly 70% of those claims should turn out to be correct. Tetlock’s forecasting research and probability training studies show calibration is trainable with practice and feedback — the evidence here is specific and replicable.
- Calibration Practice
Calibration training teaches you to match your stated confidence levels to your actual accuracy: if you say "70% confident," roughly 70% of those claims should turn out to be correct. Tetlock’s forecasting research and probability training studies show calibration is trainable with practice and feedback — the evidence here is specific and replicable.
- Calibration Quiz
Calibration training teaches you to match your stated confidence levels to your actual accuracy: if you say "70% confident," roughly 70% of those claims should turn out to be correct. Tetlock’s forecasting research and probability training studies show calibration is trainable with practice and feedback — the evidence here is specific and replicable.
- How To Be Better Calibrated
Calibration training teaches you to match your stated confidence levels to your actual accuracy: if you say "70% confident," roughly 70% of those claims should turn out to be correct. Tetlock’s forecasting research and probability training studies show calibration is trainable with practice and feedback — the evidence here is specific and replicable.
- Calibration By Domain
Calibration is domain-specific — find where your confidence most exceeds your accuracy.
Identify the specific domains where you are most overconfident
- Calibration Log
Keep a forecast log and score it — you cannot improve calibration without feedback on where you were over- or under-confident.
Score your own past predictions to calibrate your outside-view use
Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.