Do you track your decisions?
I see a lot of people posting about tracking their goals, habits, and progress... How many also track their decisions?
#ask-ih
I see a lot of people posting about tracking their goals, habits, and progress... How many also track their decisions?
#ask-ih
Hey!
I had started to tracking my decisions 2 days ago. What a nice coincidence :)
I realized that I forget my decisions some times and make the same mistakes again and again.
Here is an example,
The decision: I won't get a freelance job to earn more money while working full time. I won't make myself stressful.
And then, I always forget that decision and why I made this decision, after a while.
I get another freelance job and I say again "Why did I get this job? pfff"
Finally, I just put my decisions to google spreadsheet with the date and reason. I'm continuing to add new decisions as well. and the most important thing is I read them every morning :)
Hey @selahattin I like the idea of reviewing them every day. The thing that I struggle with is often by the time I know if a decision has paid off or not I've either forgotten the decision entirely, my reasoning when I made it or what I expected the outcome to be.
When you review your past decisions are you trying to learn/get better at making decisions or just checking if you are still following your past decisions?
As I said, I just started it 2 days ago. The main reason to track my decisions is I don't want to make same mistakes again and again. I can also check them when I need to make a new important decision for my life or job.
I can give the same example again. Let's assume there is a freelance job opportunity but it takes a lot of time and I need to make a decision here. I'll go to my list and see that "Don't take a freelance job while you're working full time, it'll make you stressful". So, I'll reject that job! :)
You can think "You already know that a lot of jobs make you stresfull, because you experienced it" But no! I always forget it somehow after a while and say yes to customers :|
It's an only one example we can find a lot of example of course.
I do it sporadically in a notes document — but I'll create an app whose purpose is exactly this: providing a workflow for recording decisions (and their reasons) within multiple contexts (personal life, various projects, work in general, ...).
The workflow sounds super interesting. What do you think is missing from your current notes document?
The biggest problem with putting everything in a document is that it grows bigger and bigger – thus I need to invest time in organizing it, so that the important decisions are not falling through.
Like @selahattin I review my past decisions/learnings and their reasons regularly. Since the list grew pretty big after a while, I divided them into multiple review cycles (daily, weekly, monthly and yearly) and several context (personal, work, family, relationships).
My process looks like this: a fresh decision is out into the daily review. After a while (1 or 2 weeks) it's pretty much ingrained into my brain so that it's ok to only see it once per week. And after a few weeks I only need it once per month, later once per year. While a decision is passed over from cycle to cycle I also refine it and some are even removed entirely, because they didn't work out as well or don't apply anymore. What I'm also experiencing is that some decision even become principles I want to live by.
I really like this workflow, but it takes a lot of manual work and time to organize it regularly. My goal is to implement this workflow in an app, that takes care of all those chores. As a user I'm just opening the app every day and review whatever the app shows me.
Another topic I'm really interested in and that ties well into this concept are group decisions. But that's another big topic... :)
Hi! This is a topic I'm really thinking about lately, so far for me:
With decisions, are your tracking these in the google doc? What do you record about each decision?
I don't have a defined template, most of the time:
what I lack so far it's a way to connect them together in a chain, reason on whole path behind connected decision, because maybe are decisions I reasonate about it late evening or in the morning, so there is a huge need to focus and re-connect to past decisions.
To explain idea in my mind: it's like when you use google maps when you zoom in:
That's a really good idea. I track all the other things (goals, issues, milestones, etc.) like most people. Used to do it online, but found writing it down was helpful. Slowed the brain, let me think more clearly. First started with Bullet Journal for this sort of thing, but have now moved on to Heroa.co.uk as it's designed more for freelancer type people.
One decision-related thing I have started is building a list of "decision-making algorithms" (which I learned from Ray Dalio's 'Principles'). Basically, when you start to see a pattern of decision-making on an issue that crops up repeatedly, write down the decision that works well in that scenario and gets you the outcome you want. You then don't need to spend the willpower or energy (which is finite) on thinking of and making the right decision, you just follow the rule (which is lower effort).
Some examples:
IF demotivated and lazy, READ a good book and REDUCE screen time.
IF depressed or down, WORK OUT more, get good SLEEP, and EAT healthier food.
IF overwhelmed, PRIORITISE and EXECUTE.
Does anyone else do this?