A running record of every important call you made — why, expected impact, follow-up, and outcome.
A decision log is a deliberately simple journal of the meaningful decisions you make as you run the business. Pricing changes, hires, contracts you signed, clients you fired, suppliers you switched, marketing experiments you ran. Each entry captures what you decided, when, why, what you expected to happen, and — later, when you fill it in — what actually happened.
The point isn't the log itself; it's the act of writing things down. A year later, you can scroll back and see which decisions paid off, which didn't, and (most usefully) what you were thinking at the time. Without the log, owners systematically rewrite their own history: every good call feels obvious in hindsight, every bad call feels unforeseeable. The log keeps you honest.
Add a new entry the same day you make the decision
Memory degrades fast. Type it in within 24 hours or it loses fidelity.
Give it a short title and pick a type
Pricing, Hiring, Cash Flow, Client, Project, Marketing, Cost Cutting, Operations, or Other.
Write what you decided in one or two sentences
Plain English. No jargon. Your future self has to understand it.
Note the expected impact and any follow-up date
Even a vague expectation is more useful than nothing — it forces you to be concrete.
If the decision was informed by a saved scenario, link it
Connects the numbers behind the call to the call itself.
Come back later and fill in the outcome
This is the part that turns a log into a learning system.
Email and chat capture the conversation, not the call. The decision log records the actual choice and your reasoning at the time — separately from the back-and-forth that led to it. Six months later, that distinction is the difference between 'I vaguely remember we did something' and 'we chose option B because of X — and here's how it played out'.
Aim for two minutes of typing. Title, one-line description, expected impact, optional follow-up date. Long entries get skipped and the habit dies. Short ones build the habit.
Project tools track work to be done. The decision log tracks judgment calls you made — including the ones that don't have a project attached. Hiring a person, raising a price, walking away from a contract: these are decisions, not tasks.
Yes. Each decision can be tied to a saved tool run, so the numbers behind the call (cash runway model, employee true cost, project quote, etc.) are one click away. The point is to keep the story straight: you ran the numbers, you made the call, here's how it played out.
It's included in Founding Lifetime Access (€99 one-time), as part of the Monthly Business Review + Decision Log bundle. The free tier covers the Business Health Score, Profit Margin Calculator, and Break-Even Calculator.
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