Decision Journal in Notion
optemization.comWhat: Two Notion database templates of decisions modeled after the Farnam Street Decision Journal.
Why: To help you and your team make better decisions.
How: Once you receive a link over email, open it and click "Duplicate" on the top right to copy this page to your Notion workspace. Use it.
Here's a blog post about this template was published on the Digital Opssessions newsletter. There's also a video breakdown: https://optemization.com/decision-journal-notion
Huge work! We work together and using this decisions flow (with a slightly different template) for our own team decisions. Gotta say it's very useful, helps wrap ones head around difficult situations
notes + diarying as the form of self-investment is popping up everywhere
there are historical examples (leslie groves composed his autobiography of the manhattan project from his daybook)
for doing business (CRM users capture the customer's needs and situation, given that the next conversation might be in 6 months)
and for thinking (capture where you are, take a break, read and think about it the next day)
St. Igantius of Loyola (founder of the Catholic Jesuit order), outlined a process of discernment that is very similar to the decision journal method nearly 500 years ago in his Spiritual Exercises[0]. Of course, there is a distinct focus on the discernment of spirits, but the prompts in the decision journal are generally the same.
[0] https://www.marquette.edu/faith/ignatian-principles-for-maki...
Hmm, maybe we can bring that discernment of spirits part back to the template? JK
> leslie groves composed his autobiography of the manhattan project from his daybook
I had no idea, and this is a great example of why I read Hacker News every day.
Cliff Stoll did the same when while writing the Cuckoo's Egg.
I guess it's just a natural way of doing it. You need to write every day, then assemble -> why not write in your dailies
good rec
This is really cool, but as a futures trader I'm a sucker for this kind of thing.
I guess perhaps this is a subset of "range of outcomes", but one specific category I've found very useful is "pros and cons" -- even just looking at an itemized list of one vs the other can jog your brain a bit.
yeah, sometimes I feel that the FS template is an overkill that's why I delete prompts often. Maybe it's a good idea to create a "simple decision" template.
Related:
woah! makes me think, once Notion has reliable API and offline mode, we'll be building entire products there.
For software projects I like markdown architectural decision records:
This is actually very similar in structure. With possible consequences, outcome, decision pros and cons
This is really nice! Will give it a try :)
Let me know how it goes! We're also trying it out the past month. Using it for business decisions