Record decisions with five fields: decision, alternatives, available info, criteria, revisit conditions

Why This Is a Rule

Most decision records capture only the conclusion: "We decided to use PostgreSQL." This loses the four elements that make the decision reviewable, learnable, and revisitable. Without the deliberation context, future-you (or your successor) can't evaluate whether the decision was well-reasoned, can't learn from the process, and can't determine when conditions have changed enough to warrant revisiting.

The five fields preserve the full deliberation context: Decision (what you chose), Alternatives (what else you considered — preserves the rejected options for potential future reconsideration), Information available and missing (what you knew and what gaps existed — prevents hindsight from inflating the knowledge base), Optimization criteria (what you were optimizing for — makes trade-offs explicit), and Conditions for revisiting (under what circumstances this decision should be reconsidered — creates a tripwire for when the decision may no longer hold).

The "conditions for revisiting" field is the most commonly omitted and the most valuable: it pre-commits to a review trigger, preventing both premature revisiting (constantly second-guessing) and pathological persistence (never reconsidering despite changed conditions).

When This Fires

• Making any decision that you or others will want to understand months later
• Writing ADRs, project decision logs, or personal decision journals
• When the deliberation was complex enough that the conclusion alone doesn't capture the reasoning
• Complements Record five elements at the moment of every significant decision — before hindsight rewrites it (decision context at commitment) and Have AI argue against your decision before finalizing the record (AI devil's advocate)

Common Failure Mode

Recording only the decision and the reasoning for it, omitting alternatives and missing information. This produces a document that reads as a justification rather than a deliberation record. The rejected alternatives and identified gaps are where future learning lives — they show what you considered and what you couldn't know, not just what you chose.

The Protocol

For each significant decision: (1) Decision: one sentence stating what you chose. (2) Alternatives: what other options did you consider? Why were they rejected? (3) Information: what data was available? What was specifically missing or uncertain? (4) Criteria: what were you optimizing for? What trade-offs did you accept? (5) Revisit conditions: under what specific circumstances should this decision be reconsidered? These five fields take 5-10 minutes and produce a record that remains useful for years.