Decisions
Keep the decisions you make with AI.
A lot of what you do with AI isn’t writing. It’s thinking a decision through. You lay out the options, weigh them, and make the call. Then the decision quietly dissolves back into the chat, and a month later you’re weighing the same options again.
The decision is the part worth keeping
Asking for help deciding, what to buy, which vendor, whether to hire someone, doesn’t end in a document you file away. It ends in a conclusion: the options you considered, why you ruled some out, and what you finally chose. That reasoning is easy to lose and expensive to rebuild.
When you can’t find it, you don’t just forget the answer. You forget why it was the answer. So the doubt creeps back, and you re-open the whole question from scratch.
So you don’t decide twice
Once you land on something, you tell ChatGPT or Claude to keep it: “Save the decision: buy, not lease, and why.” It arrives sorted: the options you weighed, the call you made, and the reason behind it. If a fact changes later, you say so, and the old value is filed behind the new one. When the question comes back, you open the project and see the decision standing where you left it, with its reasoning intact.
This works the same for a work decision and a personal one: a tool you’re choosing for the team, a vendor you’re comparing, a candidate you’re weighing, or a big purchase at home. If it was worth deciding carefully, it’s worth keeping.
What that looks like
Say you’ve been working out how to replace the family car: a few evenings comparing buying against leasing, then models, prices and trade-offs. You made the call. Here’s the project you’d keep, so you never have to reason through it again:
Car: buy vs. lease
- Current
- Decisions
- Buy, not lease. We keep a car eight years or more, and every lease we priced had a mileage cap the commute would blow straight through.
- Hybrid, not electric: no home charger and a long commute make charging a hassle for now.
- CR-V over RAV4: three child seats fit across the back. They don’t in the RAV4.
- Open questions
- Finance through the dealer, or the credit union? Waiting on the credit union’s rate before deciding.
- Notes
- Insurance came back about $40 a month cheaper on the CR-V than the RAV4.
- Recent changes
Six months from now, if someone asks why you didn’t go electric, the answer is right there, with the date on it, and whether it was you or an assistant who wrote it down. You don’t have to re-run the whole comparison. The one thing still open is written down too, so you know exactly what you were waiting on.
Usually, reading the project is enough. When a decision does need revisiting, the credit union rate comes in, a new option appears, you can pick it up in ChatGPT or Claude from where you landed, not from zero.
Decide it once.