What is commitment review?

Commitment review is a concept in personal epistemology: Regularly review all active commitments to ensure they still deserve your resources.

Example: Every Sunday at 4 PM you sit down with a cup of coffee and open the same document. It lists every active commitment in your life — twenty-three items across six domains. You read each one aloud. For each, you ask three questions: Is this still within budget? Have any exit criteria been triggered? Would I re-enter this today knowing what I know now? The first time you did this, eighteen months ago, the review took ninety minutes and you released four commitments that had been quietly draining you for over a year. Now it takes forty minutes. Not because you rush it, but because your portfolio is cleaner — you carry fewer commitments, each one deliberately chosen. Three weeks ago the review surfaced something you had been ignoring: a professional obligation whose exit criterion had been met for two months. You had been rationalizing your way around it. The review, with its structured questions, made the rationalization visible. You began your exit process the next morning. Without the review, you would have carried that dead commitment for another six months, accumulating guilt and leaking cognitive resources the entire time.

This concept is part of Phase 34 (Commitment Architecture) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for commitment architecture.