A room for Teams making shared choices

Simple Decision Notes

Write decisions so a person who missed the meeting can still follow the story.

Why this might help

When your team makes a decision together, the people who were in the room remember it. Everyone else is guessing. A simple decision note fixes that. It captures what you chose, why you chose it, and what happens next — in five short lines. No long documents, no buried email threads. Just a clear little record that anyone can read in under a minute and actually understand. Think of it like leaving a friendly note on the fridge so your teammate knows what's for dinner, even if they missed the conversation.

Does this feel familiar?

  • Someone asks 'wait, why did we go with that?' two weeks after the meeting
  • A teammate who was on holiday comes back and has to piece together what changed
  • Your team keeps revisiting the same choice because nobody wrote down the reason
  • A new person joins the project and can't figure out how things got to where they are

Try this together

  1. Right after a decision lands, jot it down before the meeting ends — even a rough draft beats nothing
  2. Write the 'why' in plain words, like you're explaining it to a friend who wasn't there
  3. Name one person who owns the next step so it doesn't float in the air
  4. Share the note in the same place your team already looks, not a separate tool nobody checks
  5. Read it back out loud before you close the meeting — if it sounds confusing, fix it now

Five-Line Decision Note

  1. Line 1 — Decision: Write one sentence that says exactly what your team chose to do
  2. Line 2 — Reason: Write one sentence explaining the main reason you chose it
  3. Line 3 — Options skipped: Name the other ideas you considered but didn't pick
  4. Line 4 — Owner and next step: Write who does what first, and by when
  5. Line 5 — Who needs to know: List the people or teams this decision affects

Questions worth talking about

If someone missed this meeting, would they understand our decision just from reading this note?

Are we writing down the reason, or just the outcome?

Who's going to feel the impact of this choice, and do they know about it yet?

A few common questions

Does every small decision need a note like this?

Not every tiny call needs one. A good rule of thumb: if someone not in the room would be confused or surprised by the decision later, write the note. If it only affects the two people who talked about it and it's done in five minutes, you can probably skip it.

What if we change our minds after writing the note?

That's totally fine — decisions change. Just write a new note and link it to the old one. A short line like 'we updated this on Tuesday because the timeline shifted' is enough. The goal is a trail someone can follow, not a perfect permanent record.

Can we store these notes somewhere the whole team can see them over time?

Yes, and that's where it gets useful. In Tindlo, you can attach a decision note to a work item using the Brief or Comments field, so it lives right next to the task it belongs to. Your team can see it in context when they're looking at the schedule, without hunting through a separate document folder.

Keep the story close to the schedule

A date makes more sense when you can also see the reason, the owner, and the work around it. Tindlo brings those pieces together when a calendar alone isn't enough.

See how Tindlo works →

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