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Vision⚓︎

Vision document — describes purpose and intent, not implementation.

What This Is⚓︎

The Decision Memory System (DMS) is a tool for remembering and learning from our thinking. It helps us keep track of why we made certain choices so we can look back and get better over time.

DMS helps us capture:

The Topic — What were we thinking about?
The Choices — What paths did we consider?
The Why — Why did we pick one over the others?
The Goal — What did we think would happen?
The Reality — What actually happened in the end?
The Lesson — What did we learn for next time?

Goal

Over time, this turn s our daily experience into knowledge. It helps us make better choices instead of making the same mistakes again and again.

Scope Boundary

DMS is built for a specific purpose. To keep it simple and useful, we follow these rules:

  • Not a Task Manager: It doesn't track "To-Do" lists.
  • Not a Note App: It isn't for random notes or scribbles.
  • Not a Document System: It isn't for storing files or long reports.

It is a memory system for reasoning and outcomes.

Why This Exists⚓︎

We are often good at making choices but bad at remembering our own reasons. We tend to forget what we were thinking at the moment we made a decision.

Without a record, we often forget:
1. Why we chose one option and not another.
2. What we assumed was true at the time.
3. What we expected to see as a result.
4. If the choice actually worked out.

Because we forget:
We make the same mistakes twice.
We misremember how we solved problems in the past.
We argue about past choices because we don't have a shared memory.
Teams lose knowledge when people leave.

DMS exists to save our thinking, not just our results.

How DMS Is Used⚓︎

These examples show how DMS helps different users track their thinking and learn from it.

Focus: Improving your own life by looking at your past choices.

1. Career: The Job Offer

  • Topic: Should I take the new job?
  • Choice: Stay at current stable company vs. Join a risky startup.
  • Why: I chose the startup because I wanted to learn faster.
  • Result: The startup failed in 6 months, but I learned 3 years' worth of skills.
  • Lesson: Risk is okay if the "learning" is the primary goal, not just the money.

2. Health: The Sleep Test

  • Topic: Why am I tired every afternoon?
  • Choice: Drink more coffee vs. Fix my sleep schedule.
  • Why: I chose to fix sleep because coffee was making me anxious.
  • Result: I felt better, but realized my late-night screen use was the real issue.
  • Lesson: Solving the symptom (tiredness) is not as good as solving the cause (blue light).

3. Finance: The Big Purchase

  • Topic: Should I buy a car or use ride-sharing?
  • Choice: Buy a used car.
  • Why: I thought it would save money on daily commutes.
  • Result: Maintenance costs were much higher than expected.
  • Lesson: Always calculate "Total Cost of Ownership," not just the monthly payment.

Focus: Building a shared history so the team doesn't forget "why" things are the way they are.

1. Tech: Choosing the Language

  • Topic: What language should we use for the new service?
  • Choice: Go vs. Python.
  • Why: We picked Go because we needed high speed for data processing.
  • Result: The system is very fast, but hiring Go developers was harder than expected.
  • Lesson: Performance needs must be balanced with how easy it is to find talent.

2. Product: The Feature Cut

  • Topic: Should we launch with 5 features or 2?
  • Choice: Launch with 2 "perfect" features.
  • Why: We wanted to get user feedback as early as possible.
  • Result: Users loved the simplicity and told us the other 3 features weren't even needed.
  • Lesson: Guessing what users want is expensive; asking them with a small launch is cheap.

3. Process: Meeting Rules

  • Topic: We are spending too much time in meetings.
  • Choice: No meetings before noon.
  • Why: To give the team "Deep Work" time to actually build things.
  • Result: Productivity went up, but communication slowed down.
  • Lesson: We need a 15-minute "Sync" at 12:00 PM to bridge the gap.

Focus: Keeping the company's "Brain" alive even when people change jobs or leave.

1. Strategy: The New Market

  • Topic: Should we expand to the UK market?
  • Choice: Yes, open a London office.
  • Why: We believed our success in the US would easily repeat there.
  • Result: We struggled because UK regulations were different.
  • Lesson: Never assume "Success in Region A" means "Success in Region B."

2. Operations: Remote vs. Office

  • Topic: What is our long-term office plan?
  • Choice: Become a "Remote-First" company.
  • Why: To save on expensive rent and hire people from anywhere.
  • Result: We saved $1M in rent, but team bonding became harder.
  • Lesson: The money saved on rent must be reinvested into team retreats.

3. M&A: The Acquisition

  • Topic: Should we buy the smaller competitor?
  • Choice: No, build the features ourselves.
  • Why: Their technology was too old to integrate with ours.
  • Result: It took us 12 months to build, but it was perfectly clean.
  • Lesson: Buying a company is often buying their "problems" as much as their "customers."

Core Idea⚓︎

The main part of DMS is a Topic — a thread of thinking about a specific subject over time.

A Topic brings together:
1. The question we are trying to answer.
2. The choices we looked at.
3. The reasons behind our pick.
4. The decision we made.
5. The outcome (what happened).
6. The lessons we learned.

Guiding Principles⚓︎

  • Save the reasoning, not just the final result.
  • Keep track of what was uncertain, not just what we were sure of.
  • Encourage looking back, not just logging data.
  • Respect privacy and who owns the data.

The Big Picture⚓︎

DMS is a system that helps us become wiser over time. It does not try to think for us. Instead, it helps us understand our own thinking, learn from our past, and make better choices for our future.

Philosophy

DMS is not about doing more work.
It is about deciding better.

TODO⚓︎

  • Explain how often to review old decisions.
  • Add a way to link related topics together.