This article is a self-help piece for improving your
decision making. Many of the decisions
we make day in and day out are made while on autopilot. We don’t really think about what evidence is
primarily driving our decision process and so pre-existing beliefs, the path of
least effort, and identity-resonating behaviors often dominate much more than
they should.
The idea of the Aha journal is that whenever you make a
decision that has salient enough consequences that it wakes you out of
autopilot, you should write it down. Write
down what happened and why you think you chose wrong. This is important because
if you don’t, it is easy to attribute it with minimal consciousness to an
exception and not bother to even remember the event. Your decisions will never improve. But if you train yourself to notice irregularities
and inconsistencies, and then make an immediate effort to investigate which of
your preexisting beliefs or expectations led you astray, you can learn to be
more metacognitively aware and better prepared for decisions in the
future.
This is a talent I am not sure we all have in us. It requires a very high level of
open-mindedness, cognitive focus, and future-thinking. You also have to be willing to handle identity-dissonance - being able to admit your fallibility. It is easy to say you can do each of these,
plan to do each of these, and imagine yourself doing each of these. But actually doing them is another story.
The Takeaway
If you can force yourself to keep the Aha moment journal and
be open minded enough to be honest about it, this can lead to a huge
improvement in your decisions. It would
be applicable across the board for making decisions at work, home life,
personal health, socially, and more. Not
only would you get better at specific decisions that you make all the time, but
just the ability to maintain metacognitive awareness can make new decisions
more reliable by identifying likely shortcuts in advance.
I would recommend an additional piece to the description in
the article that might make it easier to get some benefit from an Aha journal (if
you are not so great at it) or to make it more powerful (if you are already good at it). Take the list of Aha moments in your diary
and mine it for regularities. Even if
some specific biases don’t occur repeatedly, you might be able to find some
similarities. Perhaps you are often
subject to identity-resonance biases but not so much the least effort
bias. That would be enough to help out
in many cases.
Your Turn
Do you have any practices like this? Please share. Are you willing to give the Aha
journal a try? Let us know how it turns
out.
