Run a weekly decision review session

Set aside 20 minutes each week to score past decisions and extract one lesson.

Why it works

Decisions and their outcomes are separated in time, which means feedback is only useful if you create a deliberate moment to receive it. Without a regular review ritual, entries in a decision journal never get closed, outcomes never get compared to predictions, and the feedback loop — the only reason to keep the journal — never closes. A weekly cadence is frequent enough to keep the reasoning fresh and infrequent enough not to feel onerous.

How to do it

1. Book a recurring 20-minute weekly slot, perhaps Friday afternoon.
2. Open any entries that have reached their expected outcome window.
3. Score each on process and outcome (separately), note what surprised you.
4. Write one sentence of lesson and one sentence of application to an upcoming decision.

Evidence

Structured review improves goal-attainment and learning from experience — a consistent finding in goal-setting research. The specific "weekly decision review" cadence is a practitioner convention, not a tested schedule, but the review-beats-no-review principle is solid. Anseel and colleagues found that reflection combined with feedback improved subsequent task performance more than feedback alone, supporting the deliberate review step rather than passively receiving outcomes. (observational)

The benefit of review in principle is well supported; the optimal cadence for decision review specifically has not been studied. Weekly is a reasonable default, not a magic number.

Sources

• Anseel, F., Lievens, F., & Schollaert, E. (2009). Reflection as a strategy to enhance task performance after feedback. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 110(1), 23–35.

Common mistake

Writing journal entries but never reviewing them, which preserves the record without extracting any feedback — the equivalent of a fitness tracker you never look at.