Decision Journal

“Experience is the best teacher” - that’s simply not true.

“Maturity doesn’t always come with time; sometimes age brings nothing more than wrinkles and gray hair. We’ve all heard, “Experience is the best teacher”, but that’s simply not true. It’s Evaluated Experience that is the best teacher.” - John Maxwell

We go about our day to day lives without observing ourselves. We don’t take a pause. Everyday we take several decisions, small and big. A lot of them are based on our intuition. In fact, we take those decisions subconsciously. Forget observing, it means we don’t even think before taking decisions. We are mindlessly marching on in our lives, and hoping our decisions would serve us well. And with experience, we would get better at them. After all, more experience means better decision making, right? This framework works fine. If we had to consciously think about every decision, we would paralyze.

On the other hand, we give a lot of thought about some crucial decisions in life. We write a pros and cons list. We discuss them with our partner and colleagues. Then we take an informed decision.

But have you ever looked back and thought about a decision you made 6 months ago? Is that decision still right? Were your assumptions correct now that you have seen the outcome?

Most of us never debug our lives like that. Even when we do, we’re tinted with Hindsight Bias which always justifies our past decisions and actions. It is also known as the “knew-it-all-along effect.”

Decision Journal

As the name suggests, a Decision Journal is a journal about the decisions you make, at the time of the decision. Decision Journal is a simple document which describes what mindset you’ve when you make the decision. It’s written at the time of decision-making. That time, you are not biased by the outcome. Shane Parish has also written about it.

The Decision Journal is in a QnA format. You answer questions like, “What decision are you making”, “What outcome do you expect”, “Why do you think that outcome will occur”, etc.

Here’s the template that I use -

Date of the Decision:

8 Questions to Answer:

• What is the situation?

• What decision is being taken?

• What major alternatives were considered?

• What is the expected outcome?

• Why do you believe the outcome will occur?

• What are the consequences if the outcome doesn’t occur?

• What would be the course of action if the outcome doesn’t occur?

• How do you feel at the time?

You can create our own template that works for you. I know some executives who keep this very short and do it every week. I try to be as thorough as possible. I write it for big decisions I’m taking.

Once you answer these questions, you put a review date at the bottom. This date can be 3/6/12 months out - depending on when you can expect to see the outcome happening.

The template that I use for review -

Date of the Review (3/6/12 months after):

2 Questions to Answer:

• What happened?

• What did you learn?

Feedback loop

You create a feedback loop when you write Decision Journals. This is what John Maxwell called as “Evaluated Experience.” Evaluating your experience, decisions, and outcomes is the most effective way to improve yourself. You must take time to pause and reflect. No matter how small or infrequent your reflection is, it’s bound to help. You’d be far ahead than most who are blindly moving forward without a retrospect.

This practice helps you develop new perspectives on situations as well. When you know you’ll be writing about it and reviewing it in 6 months, it forces you to think from different angles. You look in the future to see how your decision would shape it. How your life would be different because of this? It gives you the optimism (or fear) you need.

Yearly Review

Every year in December, I do a Yearly Review. This involves listing down the highlights and lowlights of the year, important events, what did I learn, what surprized me, and looking ahead to the new year. It’s a wonderful exercise that I now swear by.

While doing the yearly review, sometimes things get missed out. It’s not easy to remember what all happened in past 12 months after all. But through decision journals, you already have a record of important decisions you have been taking. It’s a running list of how your life is shaping. So during your yearly review, a major part would just be reviewing your decision journals. This makes your yearly review easy, and more effective.

Looking inward

Lately I’ve realized the key to improving our lives is not to learn as much as we can. But instead, implement as much as we already know.

We have an endless influx of new information from every direction. We already know what makes up a great life. We always have a new habit we know we should be doing but never do. We read a book filled with amazing insights only to forget it in a month.

What we need more of is a looking-inward mindset. We need to analyze what are the areas of improvements and deliberately work on them. Creating routines like Decision Journal and Yearly Review help us develop an inward-outlook (eh?) that we all need.