Yes or no?

As I committed myself for the future and especially for the MCP term to be very pragmatic I recently started to evaluate some personal aspects needed for pragmatism. One of them is the capability to make decisions. Without being able to make quick and downright decisions as a leader you are easily lost in the surge of compromise and bring yourself in a state of eternal doubt and reactivity.

In order to measure my personal decision-making capability I today started to carry out an idea I came up with during the "Solution" conference of AIESEC in Austria: The decision-log.
It is quite similar to usual work-logs, except for the addition that you don't only enter everything you do, but as well everything you do NOT (or better: everything you actually think about doing, but are not doing in the end).
Today I tried it this way: whenever I make a not too small decision (e.g. scratching my head is not included), I enter a closed question in the form and say if I did it or not.
To give an example here the decision-log for the beginning of my day:

10:53 Get up? – NO
10:58 Get up? – NO
11:03 Get up? – NO
11:05 Drink water? - YES
11:08 Get up? – NO
11:11 Get up? – YES
11:11 Drink water? - YES
11:12 Dress very warmly? – YES
11:18 Eat chocolate? – NO
(as you can see, I have hard times getting up)

It is important to note that due to time-constraints I am not entering the reasons for my decisions. I think this would anyway disturb the whole experiment as the log should give you insights into your habits and decisions and not immediately facilitate a day of intense self-reflection.

Using a log like this can get you a number of interesting insights about how yourself:

• it becomes more clearly where your (unconscious) priorities are
• you can see, where you accept trade offs for decisions
• you get a more holistic picture about what you are actually doing and what actions are already in your mind

Some ideas and questions on how to analyse and use a filled out decision log:

• The easiest thing is to look at your decisions and ask yourself for each and every point "Why did I decide like that?"
  
• by looking at all your Non-actions you can create some sort of an alternative "shadow day" or (if you have enough materials to see patterns in your NO-decisions) even extract "negative habits" or "habits of non-actions".
  
• Some "No"-decisions are more like "Not yet" decisions. What are the reasons for postponing these decisions and for how long are they postponed? How often does the thought about (bot) doing them occur? These decisions could be decisions you (out of whatever reason) fear to take, do not feel capable to take or would like to do but feel they are not so urgent (writing mails to friends would be such a point for me)
• Have your decisions really been what you would have liked to do? How many of them are more reactive decisions and how many more proactive ones?
  
• What makes you take a decision faster/more efficiently/right? How could you foster these factors for future decisions?

Thoughts, problems & Points to improve

• The world is not binary (yes or no). A "and, or, or" decision has to be split up into three separate points in my current way of doing it. Thus the connection between them could be lost.
  
• No-decisions are very quickly forgotten due to their seeming non-impact on ones life. My current log has much more "yes" then "no" answers. This is the reason why I decided for the "yes-no" way of doing it. In a more open way the single No-decisions would quickly get out of sight. Probably I should just just enter some more "or" questions