A decision log template your team will actually use (free download)

Why most decision logs die within a month

Every decision logstarts the same way: someone loses an argument about what was agreed three months ago, creates a page called “Decision Log”, and fills in four entries the same afternoon. Then a busy fortnight happens. The log gets its fifth entry a month later, written from memory, and its last entry the month after that. The page survives as a monument to good intentions.

The failure is structural, not moral. A log entry has to be written by a person, after the fact, in a different tool from the one where the decision happened. That re-typing step competes with real work and loses every time it matters. So before you adopt any template, including this one, accept its real constraint: the template must be so small that filling it in costs less than two minutes, and even then it survives only as long as someone owns the habit.

Design for that constraint and a plain-text log genuinely works, especially for teams of five to fifty decisions a year. This template is built for it.

The five fields a decision log needs

A useful entry answers the question a colleague asks six months later: what did we decide, when, who was in the room, and why. That is five fields:

• Question.What was actually being decided, phrased as the question you argued about. “Should the London office move when the lease ends?” beats “Office move”.
• Decision. One sentence, no hedging. If you cannot write this sentence, the decision has not been made yet, which is also useful to discover.
• Date.Settles “was that before or after the reorg?” forever.
• People. Who was involved, who owns the outcome, and, crucially, who disagreed. Recording dissent honestly is what makes a log trustworthy.
• Reasoning. Why this option won, including the strongest argument against it. This is the field future readers actually come for, and the one memory rewrites fastest.

The template adds two optional fields that earn their place: options considered (so the rejected alternatives stay rejected instead of being re-proposed as new ideas) and revisit (when, or under what conditions, the decision should be reviewed). Everything else you might be tempted to add, status workflows, priority scores, categories, tags, lowers the odds anyone fills the entry in. Resist.

One scoping note: if your decisions currently live inside meeting minutes, split them out into their own log rather than improving the minutes; meeting minutes vs decision records covers why the two documents have opposite jobs.

Download the template

Two formats, both free, no email required:

• Markdown for a wiki page, a repo, or Notion (paste it in; the headings convert cleanly).
• CSV for a spreadsheet, if your team prefers rows and filters.

Each entry looks like this: an ID and short name, then the five fields plus the two optional ones. Number the entries (DEC-001, DEC-002) so people can cite decisions in conversation, which is half the value: “that contradicts DEC-014” ends a debate faster than any meeting.

How to keep the log alive

Four habits separate the logs that survive from the monuments:

• Log the same day. A week later the reasoning is already fiction, reconstructed to sound more sensible than it was.
• One person owns the habit.Usually a chief of staff or ops lead. Logs owned by “everyone” are owned by no one; if that person is you, our page for chiefs of staff will feel familiar.
• Link entries where the decision happened. Paste the log link into the Slack thread or the ticket, so the next person who finds the debate finds the ruling.
• Cite it out loud.The first time a leader says “check the decision log” instead of re-answering, the log becomes real infrastructure.

When a template stops being enough

Full disclosure: Withose, which publishes this blog, sells software for exactly this problem. The template above is genuinely how we would run a decision log by hand, and for many teams it is enough. It stops being enough at a recognisable point: decisions happen faster than anyone re-types them, the log goes stale, and trust in it follows.

That point is not a discipline failure; it is the re-typing step breaking under load. The fix is capturing the decision at the source instead. Withose drafts the record from the Slack or Microsoft Teams conversation where the decision happened, asks the named stakeholders to record their positions, and keeps the archive searchable and checked for contradictions. You can see the whole flow on sample data in the playground, no account needed. And if the template alone solves your problem, that is a fine outcome too; it is why it has no email gate.