Knowing the model isn't the same as using it.

Most people who care about thinking well already know the frameworks. You can explain inversion, run a premortem on request, quote the 10/10/10 rule. Then a genuinely difficult decision turns up and none of it arrives — you overthink for days and pick whatever feels easiest.

That gap isn't a knowledge problem. Reading gives you the model; it doesn't build the reflex of reaching for it. Recall under pressure comes from repeated retrieval, spaced out over time — the same thing that makes anything else stick.

So Too Hard Pile is built as practice rather than reading. Ten short drills a day, each one a realistic situation where you decide which lens fits, with reviews returning each model just before you'd lose it. The goal isn't to memorise thirteen definitions. It's to get to the point where your own brain asks should I run a premortem here? before you've finished describing the problem.

• Weighted pros & cons — for when the list is long but the items aren't equal.
• Decision matrix — several options scored against the things you actually care about.
• Coin flip — not to obey, but to catch what you hoped it would land on.
• 10/10/10 — how this looks in ten minutes, ten months and ten years.
• Second-order consequence chain — and then what happens?
• Premortem — it's a year later and this failed; write the reason.
• Inversion — stop asking how to succeed and ask how this guarantees failure.
• Margin-of-safety check — what happens if you're wrong by more than you expect.
• Incentive map — who gains from each outcome, including you.
• First-principles sorting — separating what's true from what's merely assumed.
• Regret minimization — which version you'd rather explain to yourself later.
• Two-way door — is this reversible? Reversible decisions deserve less agonising.
• Root-cause ladder — keep asking why until the real problem shows up.

The Decision Toolbox runs with no account, no email and no signup. If you create an account so your practice can be saved, Too Hard Pile stores your email address, an optional display name, the practice progress you generate by rating drills, anything you write in your decision journal or saved entries, and any feedback you send.

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