How to keep a personal decision log

Every week you make small decisions at work that will matter later: which vendor to try, why a deadline moved, what a client agreed on a call, why you chose one approach over another. At the time they feel obvious. Six months later someone asks “why did we do it this way?” and the honest answer is that you no longer know.

A decision log is a running list of those decisions, written at the moment they are made. Teams often keep a shared one. A personal log is simpler, faster, and useful even when your team keeps nothing.

What to write

Each entry needs three parts:

1. The decision. What was decided, in one sentence.
2. The reason. The main reason, not every reason.
3. The date and who was involved.

Decided: renew with Acme for one year, not three. Reason: price lock not worth
the risk with the migration planned. 6 Oct, with Laura. #decision

That is enough to answer the “why” question later, and short enough to write while the meeting is still on screen.

When to write an entry

Write one when any of these is true:

• Someone will ask about it later.
• You argued about it.
• You chose the less obvious option.
• It changes a date, a price or a commitment.

You do not need to log every choice. Logging the five decisions a week that matter is far better than logging fifty that do not.

Keep it where you capture everything else

A decision log works only if writing to it is as fast as the decision. If it lives in a document you have to open and find, you will skip it. Keep it in the same place as your other captures and give it a tag. In Jot, that means Ctrl + Shift + J, the line with #decision, and Ctrl + Enter, from inside the meeting window. Full-text search covers every capture, so finding last spring’s decision later is a search, not an archaeology project. See search that covers yesterday.

Use it in reviews and handovers

A personal decision log pays off in places you might not expect:

• Performance reviews, where it shows judgement as well as output.
• Handovers, when someone takes over your work and needs the context.
• Retrospectives, where it replaces memory with dates.

Share the important ones

Some decisions should not live only in your log. If a decision affects other people, write it up for them too, briefly, in the channel or document they read. A personal log is your memory; it does not replace telling people. For meeting decisions specifically, sending minutes people read covers the shared version.

Jot is on the Microsoft Store.

Jot is a quick-capture app for Windows: one hotkey, one line, back to what you were doing. What it is, or what is still unproven.