Annie Duke's Kill Criteria: Decide When to Quit in Advance

A kill criterion is a rule for quitting that you write before you start, in the form “if X has not happened by date Y, I stop.” Annie Duke, the former professional poker player, makes the case for them in Quit (Portfolio, October 2022). Her reasoning is that once you are mid-project, sunk cost and attachment tilt every judgment toward continuing, so the stopping decision has to be made earlier, by a calmer version of you who has nothing invested yet.

What does Duke mean by a state and a date?

In an excerpt from the book published in Behavioral Scientist, Duke writes that “the best quitting criteria combine two things: a state and a date.” A state is an objective, measurable condition you have either hit or missed. The date is when you check.

Her own examples are plain. A salesperson at the software company mParticle commits to this rule: if I cannot get an executive into the room by the next meeting, I kill the deal. At X, Alphabet’s moonshot unit, a project has to be able to become commercially viable and achievable within a window of five to ten years. At the poker table, Duke’s own stop-loss was leaving after six to eight hours.

What makes these useful is what they leave out. None of them says “if it stops feeling right,” because that feeling arrives late and is easy to argue with.

What does the Everest story actually show?

Duke opens her case with Mount Everest, and her account (as she tells it on the Jordan Harbinger podcast) goes like this. Summit day has a turnaround time, a clock hour after which you descend wherever you are. She gives it as 1:00 p.m. Three members of Rob Hall’s 1996 expedition, Stuart Hutchison, John Taske and Lou Kasischke, looked at their watches at 11:30 a.m., decided they could not make the summit in time, and went down. Hall himself reached the top around 2:00 p.m. and stayed for Doug Hansen, who arrived around 4:00 p.m. Both men died on the mountain. Duke adds that Jon Krakauer called the three who turned back the best decision makers on the mountain that day, and that almost nobody remembers them.

I would repeat that story with one correction, because the details are messier than the tidy version. The time itself is disputed. Wikipedia’s account gives 2:00 p.m. with a note that some sources say 1:00, and in a PBS Frontline timeline Taske says the time was 1:00 and some had said 2:00. Critics of Krakauer’s book argue about how firm it was. I could not open Into Thin Air or Duke’s book, so I am relying on her podcast account, the Wikipedia article and PBS.

The messiness helps the argument. A rule people remember differently is a weak rule. And the person who announces a rule is the one most invested in the climb. The Everest lesson is less “have a deadline” than “have an unambiguous one, known to everyone, that does not depend on how close the summit looks.”

Why do we quit too late?

Barry Staw’s 1976 paper “Knee-deep in the big muddy” (Organizational Behavior and Human Performance) had participants make a simulated business investment decision. When results came back bad, people who had chosen the original course put in more money, and a secondary summary says the effect was strongest among those personally responsible for the choice. I read abstract-level descriptions of this paper, not the full text. Duke’s own list of culprits is sunk cost, the status quo and identity: the longer you have been a person who does this thing, the harder it is to stop being one.

The most striking evidence that we lean toward staying comes from Steven Levitt. In a field experiment published in the Review of Economic Studies (2021), people struggling with a real decision visited FreakonomicsExperiments.com and flipped a virtual coin. Over 20,000 coins were flipped. Those told by the coin to make a change, such as quitting a job or ending a relationship, were more likely to do it and reported being happier six months later than those told to keep the status quo. Levitt reads this as people being too cautious about change. Caveats: participants were volunteers who showed up to a website with a decision they could not make, and the average person with an easy call is not in the sample.

The same paper adds a relevant detail. Before flipping, people were invited to name a friend or relative who would later be asked what happened. About 30% did. Levitt’s reason was that a named third party might signal commitment and could verify the answers. That is the third piece of a kill criterion here; the Duke excerpt I read covers the state and the date but does not mention a witness.

How do you write kill criteria for a goal?

Four parts, written on one page before you begin, while you still have nothing to lose.

1. A state. Something countable that a stranger could check: three paying customers, a 5K in under 30 minutes, 400 words a day on 20 of 30 days, ten replies from 40 applications.
2. A date. An actual calendar date, put in a calendar. “In a few months” is a feeling, not a date.
3. The action. What exactly happens if you miss: stop, or switch to a smaller version. Write the verb.
4. A witness. One person who has the page and will ask on the date. They do not need to be wise. They need to ask, and to be someone you would not enjoy lying to.

Here is one filled in. Goal: freelance illustration income. State: two paid commissions. Date: February 28. If missed: pause the business, return to a day-job-only schedule, and revisit in the next year. Witness: my sister, who gets the page today.

Three habits make the page work. Write it as a pre-mortem would, by imagining the goal failed and asking what you would have seen first; the pre-mortem exercise produces the signals. Keep the number of states to two or three. And give yourself a leading signal, not only a final one, so the first date tests whether the thing is moving, not whether it has finished.

Small bets are easier to price this way. Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s tiny experiments are basically kill criteria with a short fuse: a few weeks, a question, a result you can observe.

When should you persist instead?

Rules like this can be abused by the impatient. Skill grows more slowly than taste, and a state that measures how the work feels will tell you to quit exactly when the gap between taste and skill is widest. So choose states that measure output or evidence, not mood. Quantity of finished work is a fair state at month two. Whether the work is good yet is not.

Persist when the state is on track but the feeling is bad. Quit, or shrink the goal, when the state is missed and the explanation is “I’m sure it’s about to turn.” Notice who is speaking in that sentence. It is the person with the most invested, which is why the date was fixed earlier, by someone with nothing to protect.

A final practical point: a rule only works if missing it costs something at the moment you would rather not look. Mornings are the simplest case. A 6 a.m. goal gets abandoned in the first seconds, with nobody watching, and the usual fix is a person or an app that makes the miss visible; DontSnooze is a small version of that for the alarm, with your friends as the audience. A kill date needs the same thing at larger scale: a witness who will be there on the day.

The page takes ten minutes. The step people skip is the last one, sending it to the witness.