How to Use Notes to Make Better Decisions

Why Decisions Deserve Their Own Notes

We make thousands of decisions every day, from trivial choices like what to eat for lunch to consequential ones like whether to accept a job offer, launch a product, or end a partnership. Most of these decisions happen entirely in our heads, informed by intuition, emotion, and whatever information we happen to remember at the time.

The problem is that our brains are not objective decision-making machines. We are subject to dozens of cognitive biases: confirmation bias, sunk cost fallacy, anchoring, recency bias, and many more. These biases do not feel like biases in the moment. They feel like clear thinking.

Writing things down is one of the most effective defenses against biased decision-making. When you externalize your thinking on paper or a canvas, you can examine it more objectively, spot gaps in your reasoning, and create a record that you can learn from over time.

Five Decision Frameworks You Can Use With Notes

1. The Weighted Pros and Cons Matrix

Everyone knows the basic pros and cons list. But the basic version has a flaw: it treats all factors as equally important, which they almost never are. Choosing an apartment near your office might have ten small pros, but the single con of "costs twice your budget" outweighs them all.

A weighted matrix fixes this. For each factor, assign an importance weight from 1 to 5. Then score each option on each factor. Multiply the score by the weight and total them up.

You do not need a spreadsheet for this. A spatial layout works beautifully. Place each option on different areas of your canvas, list the weighted factors underneath each, and the visual comparison often makes the right choice obvious before you even finish the math.

2. The Decision Journal

A decision journal is a running log of important decisions you make, recorded at the time of the decision, not after you know the outcome. For each decision, write down:

• The decision itself. What are you choosing between?
• The context. What is the situation? What information do you have?
• Your reasoning. Why are you leaning toward this option?
• What you expect to happen. What outcome are you predicting, and with what confidence?
• How you feel. What is your emotional state? Are you stressed, excited, pressured, calm?

The power of a decision journal reveals itself months later, when you can compare your predictions to actual outcomes. Over time, you learn where your judgment is strong and where it systematically fails. This self-knowledge is incredibly valuable.

3. The Pre-Mortem

The pre-mortem is a technique developed by psychologist Gary Klein. Instead of analyzing what went wrong after a failure (a post-mortem), you imagine the failure in advance and work backward to figure out what caused it.

Here is how to do it with notes. Write at the top of your page: "It is six months from now, and this decision turned out to be a disaster. What went wrong?" Then brainstorm every possible cause of failure you can think of.

This exercise is surprisingly effective because it gives you permission to be pessimistic. In normal decision-making, there is social pressure to be optimistic and supportive. The pre-mortem flips that dynamic and surfaces risks that would otherwise go unspoken.

Using a canvas tool like OmniCanvas for a pre-mortem is particularly effective. You can place the imagined failure in the center, then radiate possible causes outward, grouping them by category: technical risks, people risks, market risks, timing risks. The spatial layout helps you see which risk categories are densest and where you need mitigation plans.

4. The 10-10-10 Framework

This simple framework, popularized by Suzy Welch, asks three questions about any decision:

• How will I feel about this decision **10 minutes** from now?
• How will I feel about it **10 months** from now?
• How will I feel about it **10 years** from now?

Writing out your answers to all three questions forces you to consider different time horizons. Decisions that feel frightening right now often look obviously correct from the 10-year perspective. Decisions that feel exciting right now sometimes look reckless from the 10-month view.

This framework is especially useful for decisions where short-term discomfort (having a difficult conversation, making a financial sacrifice, leaving a comfortable situation) leads to long-term benefit.

5. The Reversal Test

For decisions where you are leaning toward the status quo, the reversal test asks: "If I were not already in this situation, would I actively choose to enter it?"

For example, if you are debating whether to leave a job, ask: "If I were unemployed right now, would I apply for this exact position with these exact conditions?" If the answer is no, that tells you something important.

Write out the reversed scenario in detail. Describe the hypothetical situation where you are choosing to enter your current state from the outside. This perspective shift often reveals that the only reason you are staying is inertia, not genuine preference.

Building a Decision-Making Practice

Create a Decision Space

Designate a specific area in your notes for decisions. This might be a dedicated notebook, a folder, or a section of your canvas. The key is that all your decision-related notes live in one place so you can review them over time.

Set a Threshold

Not every decision needs a formal framework. Reserve structured decision-making for choices that are consequential, difficult to reverse, or emotionally charged. A good rule of thumb is: if the decision will still matter in a year, it is worth spending 20 minutes writing about it.

Review Quarterly

Every three months, review your decision journal. Compare predictions to outcomes. Look for patterns in your reasoning. Are you consistently overconfident? Do you underestimate certain types of risk? Do your best decisions share common characteristics?

This quarterly review is where the real learning happens. It transforms decision-making from a series of isolated events into a skill you actively develop.

The Compound Value of Written Decisions

The first time you use a decision framework with notes, it will feel like extra work. By the fifth time, it will feel natural. By the twentieth time, you will notice that your unwritten decisions are getting better too, because the frameworks have become part of how you think.

Good decision-making is not about eliminating uncertainty. It is about being clear-eyed about what you know, what you do not know, and what you are optimizing for. Notes make that clarity possible in a way that pure mental deliberation cannot.

Start with your next important decision. Pick one framework, write it out, and see how much clearer your thinking becomes when it lives outside your head.