The problem with deciding in your head I have watched people lose months to decisions they never actually made. They thought about something. They talked about it. They even felt like they had decided. But when I asked them to show me where the decision was recorded, they had nothing. No document. No note. No timestamp. And the thing they thought they had decided? Still sitting in the same place it was eight weeks ago. This happens constantly. Someone running their own thing will tell me they have decided to hire, to pivot, to cut a product line, to raise prices. Then three weeks later, nothing has changed. When I ask what happened, they realise they never actually committed. They just thought about it until it felt familiar. That is not deciding. That is ruminating. Why writing changes everything The act of writing a decision down forces you to do something your brain resists: be specific. When a decision lives in your head, it stays vague. "I should probably do something about the website." "I need to sort out that supplier issue." "Maybe I should hire someone." The moment you write it down, you have to choose words. And choosing words means choosing a direction. "I will replace the website homepage by 28 February." That is a decision. Now you know what you are doing and when. You can plan around it. You can tell people. You can be held accountable. "I should probably do something about the website" is just noise. I worked with someone last year who had been "deciding" whether to close their consulting arm for eleven months. Eleven months of mental energy going into the same loop. When I asked them to write down the decision, either direction, they finally had to confront what they actually wanted. The whole thing took forty minutes once they put pen to paper. They had wasted roughly 200 hours of background processing on something that should have been settled in an afternoon. The pre-decision document Here is what I tell people I work with: before you make any decision that will affect your next quarter, write a short document first. Not after. Before. The document should answer four questions: What exactly am I deciding? What are the two or three real options? What would make each option the right choice? Which one am I choosing, and why? That is it. One page. Sometimes half a page. The magic is not in the document itself. The magic is that writing forces you to slow down and think through each option properly. Most people skip straight from "I have a problem" to "I am going to do this thing" without ever examining whether "this thing" is actually the best response. I use the Decision Matrix tool on alira.london with clients specifically for this. You put the options in, you put the criteria in, you weight them. The tool does not make the decision for you. But it makes you confront your own reasoning. Half the time, people realise mid-process that they have been ignoring an option that is obviously better. They just needed to see it written out. What this prevents Writing decisions down prevents three specific failures I see constantly. First, it prevents the decision that never happened. The thing you thought you decided but never actually committed to. If it is not written, it did not happen. Second, it prevents revisiting settled questions. Once something is documented, you can point to it. "We decided this on 12 January. Here is why. Has something changed?" If nothing has changed, stop relitigating it. Move on. Third, it prevents blame diffusion. When a decision is written and signed, someone owns it. That sounds harsh, but ownership is what makes people actually follow through. Decisions made in meetings with no record tend to evaporate. Everyone remembers the conversation differently. No one feels responsible. I have seen this play out with the Heathrow expansion discussion happening right now. Decades of consultation, analysis, debate. But until someone writes down "we are doing this, starting this date, with these conditions," it remains a conversation. The decision only becomes real when it is documented and committed to. The 48-hour rule Here is a practical constraint I use: if I am still thinking about the same decision 48 hours after it first came up, I have to write it down. Not necessarily decide. Just write down what the decision actually is and what the options are. This works because most decisions do not need 48 hours. If you are still circling something after two days, it means either the decision is genuinely complex, or you are avoiding something. Either way, writing helps. Complex decisions become clearer when you break them into components. Avoidance becomes harder when you have to look directly at what you are avoiding. The archive effect There is a secondary benefit I did not expect when I started doing this: you build an archive of your own judgement. Every documented decision becomes a record of what you knew at the time, what you considered, and what you chose. Six months later, you can look back and see whether your reasoning was sound. You can learn from your own patterns. I keep a folder called "Decisions" in my notes. It has maybe 60 documents in it now, going back three years. Reading old entries is humbling. Some decisions look brilliant in hindsight. Others look obviously wrong. But I can see exactly why I made them, which means I can actually learn something. Without that record, you just have vague memories. Vague memories teach you nothing. What to do this week Open a new document and title it "Decision Log." This is where you will record any decision that affects your next 90 days. Date each entry. Pick one decision you have been circling for more than a week. Write down the four questions: what am I deciding, what are the real options, what would make each one right, and which am I choosing. Give yourself 30 minutes maximum. If you want structure, use the Decision Matrix at alira.london. It takes about ten minutes and forces you to weight your criteria. Sometimes the answer becomes obvious halfway through.