Reckon: a decision journal that scores how right you turned out to be
Reckon
You’ve made a call that turned out right, and you remember being sure. You were less sure than you remember. Your memory of a prediction drifts toward what actually happened. Your confidence drifts with the memory. Reckon is an app built around that drift.
You write down how sure you are, before you know the answer
You write down how sure you are, before you know the answer.
Each entry holds three things: what you think will happen, why you think so, and one number for how sure you are, as a percentage. That confidence number is the whole product.
You can’t audit your own judgment from memory
You can’t audit your own judgment from memory.
Fischhoff & Beyth, 1975
Reckon is for anyone making calls they’d like to grade later. A study from 1975 shows why memory can’t grade those calls for you. People put numbers on the outcomes of President Nixon’s trips to China and Moscow. The researchers came back later, and the numbers people recalled had moved toward what actually happened.
Your seventy percent should come true about seventy percent of the time
Your seventy percent should come true about seventy percent of the time.
You log the call while it’s still uncertain, before the answer arrives. That timing is the whole point. Once you know how it turned out, the number you remember has already slid toward the answer. So the number goes down first. As things change, a thirty second check-in nudges that number up or down. Every check-in stays on the record. When the decision is over, you mark what happened, with your original prediction sitting right there. One record holds what you said then and what happened later. A notes app holds the story. A notes app cannot grade the call. Months of resolved calls draw one chart. What you said runs along the bottom, what happened runs up the side, and a diagonal marks where the two agree. Every time you said seventy percent, how often were you right? That is calibration. Above the diagonal, you were more right than you thought. Below it, you were surer than you should have been. Weather forecasters say seventy percent chance of rain, and reality scores them every day.
Reckon shows your old prediction beside the answer you’d give today
Reckon shows your old prediction beside the answer you’d give today.
Here’s the part that shows care. Thirty to sixty days after a decision is done, Reckon comes back and asks whether you’d make that call again. The app’s own description is blunt: the two answers are rarely the same.
The payoff only arrives after months of resolved calls
The payoff only arrives after months of resolved calls.
The catch is the app’s own. You do the work now and get paid late. Reckon’s maker, Roland Leth, went looking for the one statistic that flatters decision journals, couldn’t trace it to a real study, and said so instead of quoting the number. A dollar ninety nine, once. No subscription, no account. iPhone and iPad, on iOS 26 or newer.
The number you wrote down before you knew stays put
Your memory of what you predicted will drift toward whatever happened. Reckon keeps the version you wrote first.
