Annie Duke on Better Decisions: How to Decide at Work and Life

Beyond the To-Do List - Productivity for Work and Life

Erik Fisher

Business, Entrepreneurship, Self-improvement, Careers, Education

4.5 • 875 Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

I’m excited to revisit this conversation with Annie Duke to the show to talk about her book, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices. Annie is a former professional poker player turned decision strategist who blends cognitive psychology, high-stakes poker, and practical frameworks to help us make better choices in work and life—even when we don’t have all the information.

In this conversation, we cover:

Luck, Skill, and Outcomes: Annie explains why we need to stop judging our decisions solely by outcomes—and how separating luck from skill leads to better learning and better choices over time.
Thinking in Bets and Living with Uncertainty: Drawing from her poker career and academic background, Annie shows how “thinking in bets” helps us navigate uncertainty, manage risk, and make sound decisions even when the long run is a long way off.
Simple Decision Tools and Knowledge Tracking: We talk about practical decision processes—like writing down what you knew, what you believed, and what you predicted at the time—to close feedback loops faster and improve your judgment without needing 10,000 repetitions.
Escaping Bias, Sunk Costs, and Identity Traps: Annie unpacks how status quo bias, sunk cost fallacy, and “identity-protective cognition” keep us defending past choices instead of seeking truth—and how a better decision process helps us see options more objectively.
Confidence, Quitting, and Knowing When to Pivot: We explore how to calibrate confidence, tell the difference between a mountain and a molehill, and decide when perseverance serves you—and when it’s wiser (and more productive) to climb back down and choose a different path.

Annie’s insights take decision-making out of the realm of “go with your gut” and into a practical, repeatable process you can use for everything from small daily choices to major career moves. If you’ve ever looked back and thought, “If I knew then what I know now…”, this episode will give you tools to reduce those regrets and make more confident, informed decisions going forward.

Learn more about Annie and her work at AnnieDuke.com, where you’ll find her books, talks, and newsletter, along with ways to connect further. You can also find How to Decide wherever books are sold.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The weight is over. Dive into Audubles' most anticipated collection, the best of 2025, featuring top audiobooks, podcasts, and originals across all genres. Our editors have carefully curated this year's must-listens, from brilliant hidden gems to the busiest new releases.
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0:31.6	Whether you love thrillers, romance, or non-fiction,
0:33.6	your next favorite listen awaits.
0:38.8	Discover why there's more to imagine when you listen at audible.com slash best of the year. Hello and welcome back to Beyond the To Do List, a podcast about productivity.
1:01.0	I'm your host, Eric Fisher.
1:02.3	And in this conversation, we're revisiting a conversation that I had with Annie Duke on her book,
1:08.0	How to Decide Simple Tools for Making Better Decisions. And in this conversation,
1:13.7	she is sharing practical tools to improve decision quality, reduce bias, and build processes that
1:20.6	lead to better focus, smarter execution, and more productive teams. We're talking all about
1:26.6	why good decisions can have bad outcomes and
1:29.5	vice versa, how we judge others by outcomes and excuse our own results and what we should be doing
1:35.7	instead, and shifting your culture toward how do we decide instead of, did it work? I think we can all
1:42.8	agree that making better decisions is sorely needed these days.
1:46.0	I know that that's where I find myself.
1:48.2	And that's why I thought that revisiting this conversation with Annie Duke would be a good thing to do
1:52.9	and very timely for this moment in time.
1:55.4	So, enjoy this conversation with Annie Duke.
2:04.5	Well, this week, it is my privilege to welcome to the show.
2:11.1	Annie, Duke. Annie, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I will say this. I wish we had way more time to just, like, literally talk poker, but that's because up until the pandemic, I had a weekly evening poker game. And so I fully intend to. Well, why don't you still have it? You might, you know, you can do, you can play one of the online ones and do it on Zoom. It's true. But we, well, part of it was we just had so much fun being face to face. And, you know, some of the game is about playing the player, not just the
2:35.4	cards. And so we kind of missed out on that a little bit. We'd have to put Zoom up and then, I don't know. Anyway, it's already, I already feel like I'm on Zoom too much anyway. So we'll we, but luckily and hopefully we will be back to doing that at some point in the near future. I am optimistic about that.
	...

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