Question
What is decision tracking?
Quick Answer
Record decisions, their reasoning, and their outcomes to improve future decision-making.
Example: You decide to hire a contractor instead of a full-time employee. Before you send the offer, you open your decision journal and write: the decision, today's date, the three reasons driving it, the outcome you expect in six months, and your current confidence level (70%). Six months later, you revisit the entry. The contractor left after four months. Was the reasoning flawed, or did an unforeseeable event intervene? Without the journal entry, you'd rewrite history — convinced you 'always had doubts.' With it, you can see exactly what you believed and why.
This concept is part of Decision Frameworks in the How to Think curriculum.
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Go beyond the answer
This topic is part of The Staff Engineer’s Thinking Infrastructure — a guided sequence of 20 lessons.
After completing this path you will be able to consciously choose your level of abstraction, build shared mental models across teams through ADRs and RFCs, make architecture decisions that persist beyond your involvement, structure your own time in an undefined role, and manage the invisible emotional load of technical leadership.
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