Most people do have a time frame in mind when they establish a position. That time frame is usually unwritten and seldom spoken aloud, existing instead in a vague form: this one for six months or so, that one depending on how things develop. Vagueness causes no trouble while matters are going well, because nobody needs to consult the time frame during that period. A rising position raises no questions about intent. There is really only one occasion on which the frame gets consulted, and that is when a position has fallen and its owner is deciding whether to act on it.
On that occasion the vague frame does something specific. It expands. The six months originally imagined is remembered as a year, and a holding with no defined end is remembered as having always been intended for the long term. The shift requires no self-deception of any kind and is almost never noticed by the person making it. Nothing has been fabricated, since there was no fixed original to contradict. All that has happened is that something indistinct has been pulled slightly in the direction that feels better. Indistinct things behave that way under pressure.
The function of this reclassification is clear enough. It converts a decision that requires handling into a condition that requires none. Decisions carry pressure with them, since acting on one means conceding that a judgement was wrong and accepting whatever follows from that concession. Conditions are far quieter and ask only for continued waiting, which costs nothing in the moment and can be sustained indefinitely. Between the two, people choose the second almost every time, and reclassification supplies the justification that choosing it requires. Without that justification the choice would feel like avoidance rather than patience.
The cost accumulates in the composition of the portfolio. Profitable positions get sold, unprofitable ones get retained under a new description, and over several years the holdings come to consist increasingly of the latter. No single decision produces this. It is the output of a selection mechanism operating steadily over a long period, and each individual step in it looked defensible when taken. Viewed from outside, such a portfolio resembles one held by a patient long-term investor. Viewed from inside, it resembles a list of items nobody got around to dealing with.
Testing for it requires no tools and takes very little time. Lay out the current holdings and ask one question of each: at the moment of purchase, was this position genuinely intended to be held until today. Honest answers usually sort into three groups. Some were always meant for the long term and remain exactly where they were placed. Some were never really thought through and happen still to be there. Some were meant to be short and have since been renamed. The third group is generally larger than expected, and its size is the finding that matters.
The purpose of the exercise is not to sell the third group. A position held for the wrong reason may still be a good position, since the reasoning that produced it and the merits it currently has are separate matters. Selling into a loss is not automatically wiser than continuing to hold, and treating the exercise as an instruction to liquidate would simply replace one unexamined rule with another. What the exercise addresses is the quality of the record rather than the composition of the holdings.
The only change needed at the point of purchase is one additional line: how long this is expected to be held, and what would end it early. The value of that line has little to do with whether it gets obeyed, since plenty of written intentions get abandoned. Its value is that it cannot afterwards be edited. A written time frame can still be violated, and the violation at least becomes visible at the moment it happens. Invisible violations are the ones that quietly accumulate into a portfolio nobody chose.