The Concept of a Decision Journal

"In most organizations your product is decisions. [...] your success will be the sum of the decisions you make [...]."²

A decision journal is a tool to document the process, reasoning, and outcomes of important decisions. It involves writing down key aspects of a decision when it's made, such as the options considered, the reasoning behind the choice, the expected outcomes, and any assumptions or uncertainties. Over time, you revisit these entries to reflect on whether the decision worked out as expected and why.

The journal improves decision-making by capturing your reasoning, helping you spot patterns, learn from mistakes, and avoid biases. It provides accountability by forcing clear thinking and deliberate choices. Tracking decisions over time helps assess their effectiveness and refine your strategies. Reflecting on past decisions increases self-awareness and reduces emotional influence, leading to more rational outcomes. Ultimately, it helps you learn from experience and make better long-term choices.

The primary purpose of a decision journal is to enhance decision-making skills by promoting self-awareness, learning from past choices, and improving future decisions.³

A decision journal is not intended to help you reach a decision, only to track and review it.

Decisions in General

The quality of decisions decreases as more decisions are made because one gets tired of making them. Decisions can be exhausting, but they are also essential to our daily life.

Decisions often suffer from the hindsight bias. Research shows that we selectively recall information that confirms what we know to be true and try to create a narrative that makes sense out of the information we have. When this narrative is easy to generate, we interpret that to mean that the outcome must have been foreseeable. ¹

What is a Decision Journal?

In a decision journal, you chronicle bigger decisions and record how you felt when you made them and which factors contributed to the decision made.

The following points should be documented:

The choice that was made
What you expect to happen as a result of that choice
Why do you expect things to play out that way
How you feel about your decision
What factors contributed to the decision ¹

How Can a Decision Journal Help?

It isn't an in-the-moment tool for making decisions, but rather a way to reflect on the decisions you've made. By documenting and periodically reviewing your decisions over time, you'll better grasp your state of mind and identify trends or common traps you're falling into when making decisions.

A decision journal helps to refine the decision-making process.

When you tell yourself that all your decisions are good, you create major blindspots and miss improvement opportunities. You must see clearly where you make mistakes and why they happen. Ultimately, that information helps you make better choices moving forward. ¹

Two common ways people wiggle out of their own decisions are hindsight bias and jargon.

It’s hard to remember what we knew at the time and what were thinking. Hindsight makes things far more explainable and changes our story. A decision journal helps combat this by recording what you knew and what you thought at the time.

The words we use are also important. When we use vague terms, we give ourselves wiggle room. If we want to get better at making decisions we can’t give ourselves wiggle room. Be clear. Be direct. Be simple. ²

Best Practices

Write the decision journal before the decision is made official. Writing is the process where you realize that you don't know what you think you know and it forces you to explain your thinking. [2]

Don't use it for everything. Reserve it exclusively for the larger decisions that have potentially major consequences and require serious thought and deliberation.
Keep it simple. You want this to be easy to refer back to and reflect on. Having pages and pages about every option you considered and every detail about your emotional state will only make this a cumbersome resource for you. Use simple language, short sentences, and be as straightforward as possible when documenting your decisions and emotions.
Create a simple template. One of the best ways to keep things simple is to create a template you can use again. It’ll prompt you to stay focused on the need-to-know information and remove the guesswork and ambiguity from the decision journaling process.
Review your journal frequently. Look back at the decisions frequently. We aren’t great at evaluating ourselves honestly, we probably won’t be able to spot our decision-making weaknesses and pitfalls on our own. If you answer honestly and follow your prompts, your decision journal will serve as an unbiased third party that will equip you with valuable feedback. Self-reflection helps you to identify areas of improvement quickly. ¹

Templates

Documenting a Decision 1

Date I made the decision: The decision I made was: I believe this decision will lead to: Why I believe this decision will lead to that outcome: How I feel about the decision I've made: Optional: Other decisions could have been: ¹

Documenting a Decision 2

Decision Number: Date and Time: Decision: Mental/Physical State as Checkboxes (Energized,Focused,Relaxed,Confident,Tired,Accepting,Accommodating,Anxious,Resigned,Frustrated,Angry) The situation/context: The problem statement or frame: The variables that govern the situation include: Alternatives that were seriously considered and why they were not chosen: Range of outcomes: What you expect to happen and the reasoning and probabilities you assign to each projected outcome: ²

Questions to Ask Yourself When Reflecting

Are there mistakes you see yourself making again and again? Are there certain types of decisions that make you feel more anxious than others? What about the types of decisions that inspire a lot of confidence? ¹

Further Information

The Decision Making Guide: How to Make Smart Decisions and Avoid Bad Ones provides a short overview of why humans often make irrational decisions and points to different literature on decision-making. Hindsight Bias: Why You're Not As Smart As You Think You Are gives more detail on the hindsight bias.