Write down why
My business keeps a log of every decision and the reason behind it, and nothing in it ever gets edited. It's the single most useful file I own. Our house has one now too.
Tabled for now. Built, not on the homepage, still true.
The job I gave away
Re-deciding. We decided how we handle screen time. Then a hard week came and we decided it again, differently, and then again. The first answer wasn't wrong. Nobody could remember why we'd picked it.
What runs now
Every decision that matters gets one entry, 621 of them so far: the date, what we decided, and why, in the words we used that day. Entries are added, never edited. If we change our minds, that's a new entry that says we changed our minds and why. Old reasons stay visible, so I can see that the thing I want to redo at 10 PM was decided by a calmer version of me with a good reason.
My system reads this log before it suggests anything, so it stops re-opening things I already closed. That one habit removed a whole category of argument from my week.
Set up once
Open Projects, New project, name it We Decided
Paste the prompt below into its instructions.
Add content and upload the We Decided note from the kit
This is the log. It lives there and nowhere else.
Tell your partner where it is and how a line gets added
A decisions log with one author is a diary.
What it hands back
Here is what the We Decided file says about screens and bedrooms.
Original entry: 2025-11-02. No screens in bedrooms, for everyone including us. Reason: the nights this rule was broken were the nights nobody slept, and Maya's teacher flagged tired mornings.
One change since then: 2026-01-15. Screens allowed in bedrooms on sick days only. Reason: a sick kid in a dark room with nothing is miserable, and it's a clear, narrow exception with an obvious end point.
Nothing in the file specifically addresses a tablet in Maya's room as a standing, non-sick-day arrangement. The closest rule is the 2025-11-02 no-screens-in-bedrooms policy, narrowed once in 2026-01-15 for sick days only. So a permanent tablet-in-room setup would be a new exception, not something already decided.
If you want to change it again, dictate three things: the date, what you're deciding, and why. Here's a line ready to paste at the bottom once you fill in the why:
2026-XX-XX. Maya can have a tablet in her room [under these conditions, if any]. Because [your reason].
The first run
The next time something comes up that you've argued about twice, open We Decided before you decide. Tap the sound wave and say: what does the log say about screen time. It runs on this:
Before I decide this again, tell me what the We Decided file in this project already says about it, when we decided, and why. If we have changed it before, show me every time and what each change was for. If it is not in the file, say so and ask me to dictate the new entry: the date, what we decided, and why. Then give it back to me as one line I can paste at the bottom of the file.
Paste the line into the note and upload it again. Never edit an old line. A change of mind is a new line that says so.
Make it stick
The rule for what goes in: anything argued about twice. Once a month, ask it what we changed our minds about this year, and read the answer together.
Where this goes wrong
Editing old entries. The moment you rewrite yesterday's why, the log becomes a story instead of a record. The other failure is a decision that lives only as a note in the margin of something else. If it isn't in the log, nothing reads it, and you'll decide it again.
The rule underneath
The reason is the valuable part. Anyone can remember what we decided. Nobody remembers why, and why is what stops the loop.
Numbers on this page come from my own system, computed 2026-09-10: 621 dated entries in the append-only decisions log.