A decision journal is a toolbox for decision making and reflection. This can help you:
... to big or small life decisions in a more systematic way.
In each decision you wrote down, there will be a template for you in evaluating the context of the decision.
... emotional intelligence through deliberate practice. For the better or the worst, emotion is involved in decision making. Acknowledging the presence of emotion helps you regulate it.
In the journal, you can "link" each decision with multiple emotions, and then associate decisions based on the shared emotion.
... the long term impact of decisions. Journal help you look back into your decisions and see patterns you can not see in short terms.
The journal is quite maintainable and extendable. You can see recent decisions as well as past old decisions in one place
You can click Notion's "duplicate" button to save this journal template to your own space. After that, you own a private journal, that is fully customizable.
There're 3 pages in this template: (1) Decision Journal for all life decisions (2) Emotion Database for all emotions (3) Decision Guides for resources.
They're connected Notion Databases, as illustrated in Fig.1. Click it to view the detailed functionality of
Start writing down your decisions! Answering the prompt to be more context-aware.
Tips: Choose image & icon that well-represent the decision, so it's unique & vivid.
You can also modify the template within the database - if a particular prompt was not helpful to you.
Fig 1. Product Overview
Fig 1. The structure of decision journal, emotion database, and decision guides. New decisions/emotion/articles can be added to each database. (Click image to view in full size.)
An intentional design is making emotions saved in the database rather than simple attributes - this makes it easy to manage existed emotions (using a template to color-code it, for example). In addition, it powers the function to query decisions that shared the same emotion.
Fig 2. Overview of a single decision
.png)
Fig. 2 A example decision on choosing which city to study in spring 2021. A decision has many tags (attributes):
(1) Topics tag that can be used to categorize decisions
(2) Date tag
(3) Stake tag - indicating the impact of the decision, i.e. priority, risks, and impact
(4) Relevant Emotions, which connects to emotion in Emotion Database
(5) Related Readings, which connects to resources in Decision Guides.
(6) relevant decisions, which is an amazing Notion functionality that pulls in all other decisions that have an emotion-match with current decisions. This is indeed THE coolest feature of all! 😜
<aside> ❓ - Click " ↔️ open as page" to see instructions!
</aside>
<aside> ❓ - Click " ↔️ open as page" to see instructions!
</aside>
.png){kind=link}