I’ve read several books about decision-making over the last few months. One concept that stood out to me, and that was mentioned in multiple books, is the decision journal. The idea is to write down your thoughts and feelings about a big decision before you make the decision. Later, after you’ve made the decision and the outcome has played out, you can reflect and record your lessons learned. The idea is to record your thinking as it’s happening so you can more easily analyze and spot patterns later. You won’t accurately remember your thinking and feelings if you don’t write them down.

I liked this idea and have wanted to implement it for some time. I finally decided to try it out when I had a decision to make recently. The outcome hasn’t played out yet, but the exercise of writing down my thinking and feelings helped me crystallize which choice was best and why. Since making and executing my decision, I’ve reviewed my thinking and already spotted a few errors. One, my thinking in one area wasn’t as tight as I thought it was, and I could have put in more work into it. Two, how I executed my decision didn’t totally align with what I said I was going to do. Close, but not exactly what I was aiming for.

My takeaway so far is that the decision journal is helpful because without it, I likely wouldn’t have spotted those errors so early or at all. The ability to compare what I was thinking, what I did, and the result should be a great tool to help improve decision-making. I hope this becomes a habit when I make big decisions.