Assignment doesn't mean you lost. a framework for deciding what to do the morning after

Every time I get assigned shares from a CSP, I see some version of "well that trade failed" in my head before I catch myself. It didn't fail. it did exactly what a cash-secured put is supposed to do. But the emotional reaction is real, and it tends to produce bad decisions if you act on it before thinking it through.

Here's the actual decision tree I use the morning after assignment, for what it's worth:

First question: do I still want to own this stock at this cost basis? Not "do I want to own it at the current price". at my actual cost basis, which is strike minus premium collected. If the answer is genuinely no, the honest move is to sell the shares and take the L, not to immediately sell a covered call out of habit just to "make it back." I've made worse decisions chasing a covered call premium on a stock I didn't actually want than I ever did from a clean loss.

Second question, if yes I want to hold it: what's the next earnings date? If earnings are inside my preferred DTE window, I either skip writing a call this cycle or go further OTM than I normally would, because I don't want to get called away right as a catalyst hits, and I don't want IV crush on a covered call premium that I sold without realizing earnings was coming.

Third: where's IV rank on this name specifically right now, not where it was when I sold the original put. If IV has cratered since assignment (common after an earnings-driven dip that triggered the assignment in the first place), the covered call premium available might not be worth the strike discipline tradeoff. Sometimes the right move is just holding shares uncovered for a cycle and waiting for IV to normalize.

Fourth: am I rolling instead of accepting assignment? This is the one I underused for years. If I genuinely don't want the shares yet, rolling the put out (and sometimes down) for a credit is often better than taking assignment and immediately deciding I don't want it. The mistake I made early on was treating assignment as inevitable once ITM, when a roll was sitting right there.

None of this is novel to anyone who's run the wheel for a while, but I didn't have it written down anywhere until recently, and having an actual order of operations instead of relying on whatever mood I'm in that morning has made my post-assignment decisions noticeably less reactive.

What's missing from this? Curious what other people check before deciding to hold vs. sell vs. roll.