Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

by Annie Duke

The second is that making a plan for when to quit should be done long before you are facing the quitting decision. It recognizes, as Daniel Kahneman has pointed out, that the worst time to make a decision is when you’re “in it.”

A common, simple way to develop kill criteria is with “states and dates:” “If by (date), I have/haven’t (reached a particular state), I’ll quit.”