After committing to trace my own decisions late last year, I have—for the first time in my life—actual data to suss out which decisions I make have the greatest impact on my life and our business, both for better and for worse.

Decisions like whether to:

• Start and end the day when I said I would
• Treat as important what I said was important
• Let circumstance dictate how productive I am any given day

Prior to starting this practice, these could hardly be described as decisions I was intentionally making. Perhaps for you they are; but even so, you likely have no record of how often you made the decision you resolved to make, and how often you succumbed to whatever was easiest or most convenient.

In either case, I’ve found that tracing the decisions I make every single day has armed me with the most powerful motivator for change I’ve ever encountered: the truth.

Three postures toward the past, present, and future

But before we unpack the process I’ve developed for tracing my decisions, I want to touch on the only three postures I’ve realized one can take toward the past, present, and future:

• Fatalism: Believing that nothing we do will ever really change the course on which we’re currently set.
• Optimism: Believing that the future will always be better than the past and the present, regardless of circumstance or the decisions we choose to make.
• Intentionalism: Believing that the choices we make each day have the power to shape our lives and align our actions with a future we desire.

It should be pretty clear that the only posture we can even consider taking (if we are to have any hope of altering the decisions we will make in light of the decisions we have made) is intentionalism.

With that in mind, let’s unpack the 3-step system I designed for tracing the decisions I make so that you can not only begin tracing yours, but make more decisions in alignment with the future you envision for yourself.

A three-step approach to making future-friendly decisions

Step 1: Build a system of record

“What gets measured gets managed.” — Peter Drucker

There are endless ways to begin recording the decisions you make over the course of a day. Depending on how you already run your business, existing metrics you may already have access to likely record many of the decisions you chose to make—at least at work.

• How many calls did you make?
• Who did you decide to call?
• Did you send a summary text or email after?
• Did you assign yourself tasks?

Just scrolling through your phone and a few apps can reveal a wealth of decisions that you made (or failed to make) throughout the day.

But allowing the evidence of those decisions to sit in siloed systems doesn’t count as a system of record—even if you take time each day to consciously review each silo.

You have to build a unified repository, a single point of truth, a decision log.

If you have the ability to combine all that data—perhaps even automatically—do it. But just having a report of calls made, texts sent, etc. won’t serve as a true log of your decision-making because there’s not enough context.

Every entry in your log needs to be able to start with, “Chose to…,” and a day’s worth of entries can’t exceed 10 records. Anything more and the data will become so overwhelming you either 1) won’t keep up with recording/collating it, or 2) won’t be able to infer actionable insights from it.

To keep this practical, let’s look at an example decision log for a retail LO on a workday.

Example decision log

05:18 Chose to snooze alarm, no time to complete morning reading
08:32 Chose to spend first 30 minutes on LinkedIn, no posts only comments
10:54 Chose to spend morning focused on pipeline, no sales calls, no prospecting calls
12:36 Chose to get lunch with John, a little business talk, no new referrals
15:13 Chose to hit the gym on my way home, 30 mins, legs no arms
16:05 Chose to call a few partners in the car, scheduled coffee with Tim
21:00 Chose to go to bed early

This is a good start: it’s mostly raw data, not overly detailed, and shows not just the key decisions made—but when they were made.

But there’s a lot to improve on from this example, and that starts by understanding, over time, our frameworks for making the decisions we make, or don’t.

Step 2: Understand your decision-making framework

There’s an exercise many people undertake this time of year called The 5 Why’s. It’s designed to uncover the underlying motivation for a change you’ve been contemplating (e.g., switching careers) by asking why at least 5 times.

We’re going to use a similar exercise to uncover the frameworks you use to make decisions every day. Note that I wrote frameworks—plural—because you no doubt use several.

How you make decisions at work likely differs from how you make them at home, or when you’re sick vs. well, or tired vs. full of energy, or drunk vs. sober.

While asking why can be helpful for understanding why you made (or didn’t make) a decision, other questions can help illuminate our reasoning (flawed or otherwise) behind the decisions we make.

7 questions I like to ask myself when reviewing my decision log

• Did I make this decision quickly?
• What other decisions did I consider?
• Who or what did I make this decision for?
• Was this decision present-friendly or future-friendly?
• How did I feel when making this decision?
• How do I feel about this decision now?
• Would I make a different decision knowing what I know now?

Decision-making frameworks are complex, fluid, and easiest to discern when they affect decisions you have to make often, usually with little consequence.

But not every decision you will have to make this year is one you’ve made hundreds or thousands of times before, nor are they all of little consequence.

Which is why learning from the decisions we’ve made, and the reasons we’ve made them, are crucial first steps to making decisions that better align with a future we want for ourselves, our businesses, or both.

Step 3: Commit to make future-friendly decisions

Over the time I’ve been learning to trace my decision-making, I’ve found that scope is incredibly important to impact: the further back you try to trace decisions, the less clear cause and effect becomes.

In the same way, the further forward you try to control your future decision-making, the less likely you are to actually make decisions that align with the future you want to create.

My recommendation is simple but powerful: commit to choose differently tomorrow.

Let’s look back at the example decision log above. What could a commitment for the following day look like?

An example commitment to future decisions

Tomorrow, I will choose to be realistic about when I will actually start my day and to honor my alarm. I will choose to focus on sales to start the morning, and leave my afternoon open for pipelines, emails, and social. I will choose to follow up with the partners I spoke to today. I will only choose to leave the office when I feel my day has brought success, not when I feel I can’t do anything more.

Mirroring your decision log with a narrative statement detailing the commitments you’re resolved not to keep, but to choose to keep, I’ve found, produces the highest level of intentionality to make different choices than those you’ve made in the past.

Of course, to commit to future-friendly decisions, you first have to have a clear vision of the future you’re willing to work to bring about. And that requires reflection and ideation beyond the scope of this exercise.

But once that vision has been clarified, I trust this decision will help you, as it’s helped me, log the decisions you make, understand why you made them, and resolve to make decisions that better align with your desired future day after day.

Helpful guides for making better decisions

Looking for more resources on how to envision your desired future, understand why you make the decisions you make, or work to make decisions that better align with your goals?

A few resources that come highly recommended

• Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely
• Stumbling On Happiness, Dan Gilbert
• Essentialism, Greg McKeown
• Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans