The anatomy of a decision - a decision journal in action

We make hundreds of decisions a day. It does not matter if you're in customer service at a call center for a cable company, an ER nurse triaging patients, or a database analyst writing queries all day. You are confronted with too many decisions, and 99.99% of them are not worth more than a few seconds of consideration. 

In my first draft of this email, I wrote half an article about reducing the amount of decisions, so I'll save that topic for another email. Let's assume we have identified a decision that deserves careful deliberation, because it has a potentially large impact on your life or career. The template that I start from is here in the Farnam Street article, but since my actual physical Decision Journal notebook is in my desk at work, I used Evernote and adapted some of the questions into a more condensed framework that better fits this decision. Below are the steps, and in italics I've added the benefit each one generates.

  1. Write down the date, time, and some details about your mental and emotional state when making the decision. Writing it down (especially long hand on paper) eliminates the opportunity for hindsight bias to creep in

  2. State the problem as you understand it, then rephrase it in a way that any person with no context could understand. Having to rephrase the question for someone with no context forces you to confront how deeply you understand the problem

  3. Identify all the variables that play into the decision, and then rank them by relative importance to you. Listing out and ranking the variables reveals what you value most at this point in time. I think big decisions like job changes would be especially interesting to track over the decades we spend working

  4. Write out in paragraph form the range of potential outcomes from most positive down to most negative, with as many outcomes in between as you need. Weighting the outcomes for likelihood prevents you from getting caught up in the most extreme possibilities. I think a lot fewer 20-somethings would move to Los Angeles if this exercise was a condition required to establish residence in the city

  5. Write in paragraph form what you think the most likely outcome is, and if it's not your most desired outcome, write what you can do to influence the probably of reaching a more desirable outcome. Comparing the most likely outcome to your desired outcome may not only change your decision, it has the potential to completely reframe the problem

  6. Set a date six to twelve months in the future to re-read the entry and compare how it unfolded compared to your projection. 
    Setting a date far in advance for reflection gives you the space and emotional detachment to examine the quality of your decision making and your "correctness" in predicting the most likely outcome

With practice, this systematic consideration of the key factors and likelihood-weighted outcomes becomes closer to your default mode of thinking, even when not making a major decision.

Thinking about thinking and decision journaling

I'm a hardcore extrovert, so I love getting to know people. I find the question "What do you do?" to be terribly boring and limiting. I like open ended questions that give the recipient space to take it wherever is most interesting to them. I'll cover the topic of better questions in a future email, but one question I tested out a handful of times was, "What kind of things do you think about?" This question was often met with a blank stare, and a muttered, "I don't know, nothing?" I didn't understand. How do you not know what you are thinking? 

The classic example of autopilot thinking is getting into the car, driving to work, and arriving having no recollection of the entire commute. Thinking is such an automatic and invisible process, we don't often give it much thought. A core part of evolutionary success is conserving energy, and our brains have turned transforming tasks from conscious to automatic into superpowers (even highly complex ones like driving). Living and acting entirely by autonomous thinking processes, though, sacrifices the opportunity to reflect and consciously make improvements. Some people have real hobbies, but I spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about my thinking.

One of the many tactics the Farnam Street blog introduced me to for improving the quality of my thinking and decision making is called "decision journaling." The idea is to: 
  • Write out the factors that influence the decision and determine the most important ones
  • Scope the full range of potential outcomes 
  • Assigning the outcomes probabilities to determine the most likely outcome 
It's a powerful reflection technique, especially for major decisions which can't easily be reversed. I followed the recommendation in the article and bought a nice, big notebook dedicated to recording all my decisions. I was going to make the hell out of some decisions. Nine months later, it sat empty. I grew increasingly frustrated and confused, because I felt like not only was I not making any decisions worthy of journaling, I was struggling to recall any decisions I was making.  Here I was, supposedly far down the path of my journey of self discovery, and day after day I'm not able to tease out a basic thought process that must be happening several hundred times per day. I don't understand. How do I not know when I'm making a decision? 

I still struggle with this every day, but with a lot of effort and prompting, I'm starting to see glimmers of awareness. "Oh, that was a decision!" will occasionally pop in my head. I've still only used the decision journal twice - once when deciding whether or not to take a new job, and recently when deciding whether or not to press more deeply into writing by syndicating the content of these emails to a blog.

Send a note back if you want me to share the results, and if there's enough interest I'll write about it next week. I would also love to hear your answer to the question, "what kind of things do you think about?"

Interstitial Journaling

I've long envied journalers because I consider journaling to be a meta-habit. The benefits spill over from the act itself to many other areas of life. It's not (always) just a bland, narcissistic record of the minutiae of your life. At infrequent intervals I've used it to increase self awareness, help with mood regulation, and to clarify my thinking on complicated topics. It takes many forms (from Morning Pages to The 5 Minute Journal, Contentment Journal, and beyond) but there's no special formula - the key is just to write what matters most and do it consistently. Like any additive habit (versus a subtractive or simplifying habit), the benefit needs to far outweigh the cost of taking the extra time to do it. 

Many of the most prolific thinkers across history like Charles Darwin were unrelenting journalers. They filled tome after tome with every thought that ever occurred to them, leaving behind a phenomenal record of a lifetime of thinking. I've tried to pick up journaling in the past, and have failed at making the habit last beyond a few weeks. This made me wonder if I simply was not capable of being a journaler, until I was listening to Penn Jillette's description of his OCD in his episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. Some part of a successful journaling practice may be  attributable to degrees of obsessive compulsive behavior that I just don't possess (interestingly OCD also helps explain people with perfect memories). Should I just give up? 

Enter the Interstitial Journaling technique. I first read about it here on Medium. If you don't want to take the 15 minutes to read the original article, here's the crux of it: start a text file (or Evernote note), and every time you switch from one activity to another write a sentence or two about what you were doing and a few about what you plan to do next. Here's two recent examples:
  • 3-2-2020 | 11:32 AM: Feeling pretty good about what I've accomplished so far this morning. I started shaping the project Microsoft Teams site for [project x], and designed a bad ass ultra clear meeting agenda using a technique from the HBR Ideacast episode I listened to yesterday (Why Meetings Go Wrong and How to Fix Them). I framed the agenda as a series of questions so we can check in periodically to make sure we know we are making progress. Hopefully it will help keeps us on track and potentially even end the meeting early if we get the questions answered. 
    Next up: I'm going to sketch out the next steps and timeline for [project x] and have some lunch.
  • 3-3-2020 | 5:05 PM: The meeting with the key stakeholders for [project y] was pretty rigid. I don't think we are really doing a good job of landing our purpose and objective for each meeting with these important people. I think that in the future if we aren't totally ready we should just cancel and reschedule the meeting because people appreciate their time back, not having it wasted.  
    Next up: Go home and unplug for the day
It took 4-5 minutes to write each of these, including grabbing the link for the podcast episode, and this habit pulls a lot of weight: 
  1. It forces "in the moment" reflection that provides a vivid record of what I do all week, which makes writing a weekly update much easier at the end of the week. Recording as I go also makes me much less susceptible to hindsight bias when trying to recall something later.
  2. It helps me keep track of progress on the experiments I'm running, like with techniques for running better meetings (see below for more about that). 
  3. Context switching can be a major drain on productivity, and writing the journal entry provides a clear off ramp from one activity and on ramp to the next. It also serves as a signal of how frequently I'm going through major context shifts.
  4. Creates space for reflection, and increases my awareness of my emotional states as I move through my day.
I'm a few weeks into the habit, and I've found it to be easy to integrate into my workflow, even if I don't record at every transition. The true test will be if I'm able to continue to prioritize it even when things become more hectic.