Operating Habits: You Don’t Have a Strategy Problem. You Have a Memory Problem.
A 60-second daily habit that turns your decisions into a scoreboard.
You made a pricing decision last month. Do you remember why?
Not what you decided. Why.
The actual reasoning.
The thing you told yourself at 11pm when you changed your rate card and hoped nobody would notice.You don’t remember.
I know you don’t. Because nobody does.
We make dozens of business decisions a week.
Pricing. Content. Clients. Hires. Tools.
And we make them fast, because we’re busy, because the inbox is on fire, because some guy named Trevor needs a proposal by Thursday and it’s already Wednesday and you haven’t eaten lunch.
Then three months later, the decision either worked or it didn’t, and your brain does what brains do: it rewrites the story.
The client who churned? You “always had a bad feeling.”
The launch that flopped? “The timing was off.”
The price increase that worked? You “knew it would.”
No, you didn’t. You were guessing. We’re all guessing.
The difference between getting sharper over time and operators who keep paying tuition on the same lessons is one thing: creating a feedback loop.
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The fix takes 60 seconds a day.
At the end of each day, write down one decision you made. Four pieces: what you decided, why you decided it, what you expected to happen, and the specific number you’ll check to know if you were right.
That’s it. One line. Four columns.
Less time than it takes to check your DMs.
The fourth column is the one that matters. It turns a journal into a scoreboard. You’re not just reflecting. You’re pre-committing to a metric that will tell you, with zero room for narrative rewriting, whether your thinking was good.
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Once a month, spend 15 minutes reviewing.
Score each decision: did the outcome meet your expectation?
Calculate the percentage that hit.
That’s your Decision Outcome KPI. Your operator batting average.
Sort by category. You’ll find out you’re sharp on content bets but terrible at pricing. Or that your hiring instincts are solid but your client selection is costing you money.
Patterns emerge fast.
At 90 days, you have something almost no solo operator on earth has: a quantified record of how well you think under pressure.
The gap between a first-year founder and a tenth-year operator overseeing a fast-scaling global brand isn’t talent.
It’s a disciplined commitment to reps with feedback.
Start today. One decision. Four columns.
You’ll forget some days. That’s fine (but don’t miss for more than two days).
The habit isn’t meant for perfection. It’s mean to create a compounded accumulation of better understanding.
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Start building the habit today.
I built a free Decision Journal Template for you [download here →].
Four columns. Category tracking. Pre-formatted for 90 days of entries.
It’s the exact system from this article, ready to use.
Free subscribers: [Download the Decision Journal Template here.]
Paid subscribers get the full toolkit:
The Decision Outcome KPI Scorecard — a one-page reference with scoring criteria, benchmark ranges, and a monthly self-assessment to calculate your operator batting average.
The 90-Day Decision Tracker — a visual progress tracker with built-in review prompts at Day 30, 60, and 90 so you never lose momentum.
The journal gets you started.
The scorecard and tracker are what make the habit stick and the data compound.
[Become a paid subscriber and get the full Decision Outcome KPI toolkit.]
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capturing the reasoning behind decisions turns hindsight into actionable learning over time.
A simple daily habit of recording why you chose something turns guesswork into data.