Says Shane Parish, author, mental model expert and the founder and CEO of Farnam Street (FS), a company focused on timeless ideas for upgrading life and business. FS runs a remarkable newsletter, podcast and community on multidisciplinary thinking and mental models.

Members include students, teachers, CEOs, coaches, athletes, artists, leaders, followers, politicians, and more. They’re not defined by gender, age, income, geography, or politics but rather by a shared passion for living a meaningful life, doing good, and avoiding problems before they happen.

I found Parrish on Twitter, where he compresses and shares FS learning into digestible fire tweets like these ones (that's why I love Twitter):

In 2014, Parish shared the "decision journal ", a tool to "collect accurate and honest feedback on what you were thinking at the time you made a certain decision that will help you see when you were stupid and lucky as well as when you were smart and unlucky; all to make better decisions."

Read more about the thinking and structure behind this decision making framework at the link below.

Later, FS came out with a pocket-sized journal capture decisions with a pen (who uses those anymore).

The journal invites you to break down an important decision with the following prompts:

I found this framework to be quite thought provoking and challenging. Like most, I'm not used to documenting decision-making whatsoever. But approaching decisions this way and writing even just a few lines invited me to think deeper.

After using the journal digitally (more on that below) for a few months, I've integrated it across Optemization. I find documenting hiring and strategic decisions to be the most useful. And that in turn, will make me a better person and entrepreneur.

Now paper and physical journals are great but if you know me; you know I have an obsession with digitizing my operations and productivity in Notion.

As you might know, Notion is a incredible all-in-one software tool that works like a digital paper. Many use it for journaling, so keeping decisions alongside with notes, for example, would be a perfect use case.

Recently, I digitized FS's decision journal and integrated it into my personal life and our work at Optemization. Here's how it looks

Here's a video breakdown on YouTube (or Loom). You can read a deeper dive below or on Optemization, which is formatted nicer.

I structured each decision to be a database entry while splitting the aforementioned decision factors into database properties (columns) and page contents. If you haven't used Notion yet, that's one of the coolest features: any content can be stored as a property or inside of a database record.

To contextualize a specific decision record in the database, apply the template that brings up the aforementioned prompts . A new decision by default will be marked as undecided. The rest of the properties will be left for you to fill

One of the core tenets of decision making in this framework is reflection and feedback. It's so easy to overlook this part but reflecting on past decisions will improve your decision making 10x (don't @ me). Anyway, I built a three properties that help with facilitating this behavior:

Firstly, Review in, a single choice label for the duration of weeks or months after which you want to review your decision. Parrish recommended six months as the default time frame but I thought that was too constrained, so I expanded it to one week, two weeks, one month, three month and six months. Below I will explain how you can add your own .

Secondly, I find unnecessarily annoying to add the dates and figure out where you need to set the reminder, so I wrote the Review at formula. It's a bunch of nested IF statements that look at Review in and add the corresponding timeframe to Created at. It looks like this:

There's probably a way to run this better, so let me know if you think there are better ways to write it.

Note that if the Made at property is empty the Review at will return "Decision has not been made yet" string.

If you want to add a new time segment to Review in do this:

Finally there's the Remind at property, which is a simple text field where you can put your actual reminder. Unfortunately the formula field cannot do that for you. To add a reminded type @ remind and enter the date that Review in gave you.

That's it! Farewell and I hope this helps you make some great decisions. Please share on Twitter if you found this post insightful or the template useful — I'm at @optemized.

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