I’ve started writing letters to myself before making important business decisions. Most of them are 500-1,000 words. In them, I outline my reasoning and lay out the best counter-arguments to my plan.
The original idea came from Amazon’s culture of writing memos.
In a sense, a lot of blogging complements this idea: to think through things on the page rather than just in your head.
At work recently I experienced this; in writing up the logic for a decision to justify it and the alternatives considered, I changed my mind about my recommendation.
I find writing things out by hand also helps me process better and the lack of structure is less of a block. And then this next step of writing out rationale seems useful too in honing in on what truly impacted your decision and what’s really important.
