For a long time I was proud of how quickly I could decide. Speed felt like a sign that I was on top of things — that the business wasn't running me, I was running it.
It took me a few years and a string of decisions I now wish I could redo to realise I had it backwards.
Most of what I called "deciding" was responding. The day moved faster than thought, and by 9pm I'd shipped twenty choices I couldn't remember weighing. Hire that coach. Approve that price. Sign that lease. Push that update. Each one filed under "decided." Most of them were just me reacting to the loudest thing in the room.
I didn't start journaling because I read about it in a productivity book. I started because I had run out of excuses for the same kinds of mistakes repeating.
The slow part
When I started writing things down, I didn't get smarter. I got slower.
The first few weeks were uncomfortable. I'd sit with a question I'd been carrying for months — "are we ready to open in another city?" — and realise I had no idea what I actually thought. I had opinions. I had pressure. I had numbers. I didn't have a thought I could defend to myself, let alone anyone else.
What writing seemed to do, over a long time, was give me a place where the question could sit without me having to answer it that day. That was the part that took years to get used to. I'm still not great at it. Some weeks I journal nothing.
But the weeks I do — usually before something I know matters — I make fewer decisions I want to take back.
The Fitcom story I'm least proud of
At Fitcom Fitness, our internal coach certification used to have six levels. We built it that way because it looked thorough. It also took new coaches roughly two years to complete and gated revenue behind credentials that, honestly, weren't doing what I told myself they were doing.
I knew it was off for almost two years before I changed it.
Two years of watching new coaches struggle to feel competent. Two years of telling myself we'd revisit it next quarter. Two years of small justifications — the system protects standards, the system is what makes us different — none of which I'd written down where I could see them next to each other.
The morning I finally collapsed it from six levels to three, I didn't decide quickly. I decided after writing for a long time and noticing, on the page, how thin my reasons sounded once they had to share space.
We collapsed six levels to three. Coaches advanced faster. Standards went up. Revenue followed.
The decision wasn't the hard part. The two years of not seeing it was.
What I do now (some weeks)
I don't have a journaling practice I'd recommend. I don't journal every day. The notebooks I keep are messy and most of what I write never gets read again.
What I try to do — and still fail at often — is this: when I notice I'm about to make a decision that will matter in a month, I write the question down before I let myself answer it. Sometimes ten minutes. Sometimes an hour. Sometimes I sit with it for a few days before I write at all.
Most of the time, I find I wasn't ready to decide yet. I used to think that was a problem. Now it feels like the most useful thing the writing does for me.
I'm still bad at it. I'm just less bad than I used to be.