Second Brain / Industry term
Decision log
A durable record of a decision, its status, owner, date, evidence, rationale, alternatives, consequences, and revisit conditions.
A decision log is a running record of each decision you make, capturing what was decided, when, on what evidence, by whom, the reasoning behind it, and what would make it worth revisiting. The point is to preserve the why so a choice can be traced and rechecked later. Say your team picks one tool for a to-do app and writes the entry: decided to use it because it was free and already approved, on March 3, owner the project lead, revisit if the free tier adds a fee. Three months later someone asks why, and instead of guessing you open the entry and read the reasoning and the evidence it rested on.
Builder example
An assistant can propose entries from meetings and tools, but inferred rationale or ownership should remain distinguishable from explicit source evidence. Structured revisit triggers let automation surface decisions affected by a price, policy, deadline, or assumption change.
Common confusion: A decision log records why a decision was made and what would reopen it. A task list records what still needs doing. The same meeting feeds both, yet only the decision log preserves the reasoning, so a choice can be traced back to its evidence months later.