Making better decisions
Most advice about making better decisions is advice about choosing: frameworks for weighing the options, questions to ask before you commit, biases to watch for on the way in. It's worth having, and all of it stops at the moment of the decision. None of it tells you afterwards whether any of it worked.
You can get better at choosing and never find out whether you did. By the time the outcome arrives, your memory has quietly rewritten what you expected, and it rewrites it in your favor, so the one piece of feedback you'd learn from never reaches you.
These pages are about closing that loop. Write down what you predict before the outcome exists, put a number on your confidence, and score the page against reality when it reports back. After twenty entries you have a measurement, which no amount of reflection produces.
If you came for the methods themselves, six decision-making frameworks covers what each one is good at and where it stops. If a particular call is weighing on you right now, did I make the right decision? is the place to start, and hindsight bias explains why that question gets harder to answer as time passes rather than easier.
For the practice: how to keep a decision journal gives the reasoning behind each field, the template has the fields ready to copy, the evidence piece covers what the research does and doesn't support, and the ten-question calibration test gives you a baseline while your first entries accumulate. If you'd rather build this inside a tool you already use, there's a walkthrough for Notion.
How to keep a decision journal
What to write down before the outcome exists, why the confidence number has to be a number, and how to score yourself once reality reports back.
6 min read
A decision journal template
The fields I use for consequential decisions, plus a worked example from start to second look. Works on paper, in a notes app, or in a spreadsheet.
4 min read
Do decision journals actually work?
What the research actually supports about decision journals, what it doesn't, and why the one statistic circulating in their favor should be dropped.
6 min read
How calibrated are you?
A ten-question test for whether your 90% means 90%, what your score says, and the only kind of practice that measurably improves it.
5 min read
A decision journal in Notion
How to build a decision journal in Notion: the database, the views that tell you what's due, how to score your calibration, and where the setup stops working.
7 min read
Decision-making frameworks
Six frameworks for choosing under uncertainty: what each one is actually good for, where each one fails, and the question none of them can answer afterwards.
7 min read
Did I make the right decision?
You can't grade a decision by how it turned out. What you can check instead, why the honest answer needs a record, and what to write down before the next one.
5 min read
Hindsight bias
Why an outcome feels obvious once you know it, the three separate things the bias does to your memory, why trying harder doesn't fix it, and what does.
6 min read
Full disclosure: I make Reckon, an iOS app that runs this loop and does the scoring for you, which is the part that makes people keep it up instead of letting the habit lapse. One-time, no subscription. Everything here works on paper too, and the pages say so where it matters.