One of the hardest parts of adulthood?

You can make a smart decision and still get a bad outcome.

You can also make a bad decision and get lucky.

But most of us judge decisions based on what happened afterward.

Annie Duke calls this resulting: evaluating the quality of a decision based on the outcome rather than the process that produced it.

So when things don’t work out, we assume we made a bad decision.

We beat ourselves up. We second-guess ourselves. And over time, we stop trusting our own judgment.

Outcomes will always carry some luck. What you can actually improve is the quality of your decision-making over time.

That’s where the Decision Journal comes in.

SUPERHUMAN SCORING

In every edition of System Sunday, I assess the featured system across three superhuman dimensions: impact, setup, and maintenance.

Unlike your typical review, I focus on factors that influence personal growth. Get to know the evaluation system.

Impact (9.5/10)

A Decision Journal is for the major choices that actually shape your life:

• Starting a new job
• Buying a home
• Ending a relationship
• Making a major investment
• Moving cities

Before hindsight has a chance to rewrite the story, you capture what you knew, what you were optimizing for, why you made the choice, and what you expected to happen.

This does three things.

First, it slows your thinking down. Instead of deciding from a swirl of emotion and half-formed thoughts, you have to put your reasoning into words.

Second, it gives you a record you can trust. Memory rewrites things. It edits. It updates the story to match what happened later. A Decision Journal preserves your thinking as it actually was.

Third, it makes you kinder to yourself. If things don’t work out, you can look back and see whether the decision was genuinely bad or whether life was simply uncertain.

Sometimes the most healing sentence is: “I made the best call I could with the information I had at the time.”

Setup (8.5/10)

Step 1: Create one place for your Decision Journal

Open Apple Notes, Google Docs, Notion, or a physical notebook.

Title it: Decision Journal

The value comes from the thinking, so keep the tool dead simple.

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Step 2: Decide what qualifies

Only log major decisions. A good rule of thumb:

If the choice could meaningfully change your health, money, career, relationships, location, or peace of mind, it belongs in the journal.

What to eat for lunch stays out. Whether to leave your job goes in.

For most people, a handful of entries per year is plenty.

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Step 3: Use a simple template

For each entry, answer these:

1. What choice am I facing? Name the decision and the realistic options in front of you.

2. What am I optimizing for? Peace? Growth? Money? Freedom? Stability? Energy? Time with family? A lot of decision confusion is really priority confusion, so name the priority.

3. What do I know right now? Capture the facts, signals, constraints, unknowns, and anything you might be assuming.

4. Why am I choosing this? Explain your reasoning in plain English.

5. What do I expect to happen? Make the prediction concrete enough to be wrong. “I think this will be good for my career” is hard to check. “I expect a promotion or a raise within 18 months” gives you something real to measure.

Bonus lens: How do I expect to feel in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years? This is Suzy Welch’s 10-10-10 framework. It pulls you past the emotion of right now and into the timescales where the decision actually lives.

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Step 4: Write your first entry

Pick one big decision and fill out every section honestly. Make your thinking visible while you can still see it clearly.

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Maintenance (8.0/10)

Add a new entry whenever you face another major decision.

Then set one reminder for when the outcome will actually be knowable. Usually that’s 6 to 12 months out.

When the reminder fires, read your original entry before you judge the result. Ask yourself:

• What did I understand correctly?
• What did I miss?
• What would I tell a friend making this same call today?

That last question carries the most weight. Read your old entry the way you’d read a friend’s reasoning, with generosity. The question worth asking is: what can I see now that I couldn’t see then?

Go Deeper 

• Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke (the definitive book on resulting)
• Farnam Street’s decision journal template (Shane Parrish popularized this practice)

BRINGING IT HOME

Here’s to better decisions and to a tool that helps us be a little kinder to ourselves.

All systems go,

P.S. The Decision Journal is Week 23 of 52 inside Year of Systems.

It’s my new video course with 52 ready-to-use systems to level up your health, mind, money, career, and relationships.

Each system takes less than an hour to set up and makes life easier for years. 

The course is free for the first 5,000 people who pre-order my book (Already 3,850 spots have been claimed, so fewer than 1,150 remain).

Get access today for the price of a book >>