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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.