Write the decision down before you know the outcome
Annie Duke, Peter Drucker and Michael Nygard on recording decisions and their reasons, and how Trellis keeps a decision's history.
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Attention · Memory · Reflection · Learning · Life
A practice you can
return to.
Useful ideas for keeping commitments visible, protecting important work, and learning from experience.
Start with the question that brought you here. Each guide offers a small practice you can try with or without Trellis. See how Trellis fits a busy week →
Keep commitments
Remember what you promised, what you are waiting for, and what a meeting actually decided.
Your head is not a storage system
Unfinished commitments quietly drain attention. What David Allen and a lab study found, and a five-minute capture habit that helps.
Read the article ↗The meeting ends. Keep the decisions and commitments connected.
A two-minute after-meeting record for decisions, next steps and open questions, so meeting follow-through starts from facts, not memory.
Read the guide ↗Keep the promises and follow-ups that slip between lists
A simple way to record what you promised, what you are waiting for, and when to check again, across work and life.
Read the guide ↗Capture the thought before you organize it
A fast capture habit for meetings and conversations: write what happened, the next step and what you still wonder, then sort it later.
Read the guide ↗Protect important work
Give quiet priorities a place alongside deadlines and everyday demands.
Important, not urgent, and what to neglect on purpose
Stephen Covey and Oliver Burkeman on protecting quiet, important work, and how Trellis shows where your attention actually went.
Read the article ↗Give important work a place before it becomes urgent
How to protect quiet, important work: name the area, choose one next action and check weekly. Includes a worked example with three areas.
Read the guide ↗Productivity systems rarely count what matters outside work
A practical way to give one non-work area of your life a next action and a stopping point, so work does not take the whole week by default.
Read the guide ↗Reflect and learn
Return to what happened and choose what is worth carrying forward.
A weekly review you can finish and want to return to
A 20-minute weekly review in six questions: what happened, what needs attention, and the few next steps worth choosing. Works on paper or in Trellis.
Read the guide ↗Tracking tells you what happened. Reflection helps you decide what to change.
A weekly habit that pairs a record of what happened with three reflection questions, so you decide your next step with evidence.
Read the guide ↗Turn a lesson into a rule you will use
What the surgical checklist studies found, what Ray Dalio's principles can and cannot show, and how Trellis keeps guidance you choose to reuse.
Read the article ↗How to take notes you will actually reuse
Notes you never reopen are wasted effort. What Sönke Ahrens and Tiago Forte suggest, how Trellis differs, and a three-step habit to try.
Read the article ↗Build a personal playbook from experience, one useful rule at a time
How to turn one recurring situation into a rule you will reuse: write the experience, the rule and when to use it, then revise it as you learn.
Read the guide ↗Save the question, then give learning a return path
Stop hoarding reading lists. Save the question beside the source, choose one small next step and record what changed after you return to it.
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