On writing personal decision records

I have a few things in my life that I am having trouble making decisions on. None of them are life-altering, but they’re small things that have some daily impact.

Workona is a great example. I’ve been using it for a couple months and really dig it. It’s going to a subscription model as it comes out of beta and I need to decide if this is worth it to me to pay for or scale back and use the free version that’s more limited.

As I’ve been doing over the last few years, I’m looking to the skills and process I’ve learned as a software engineer to tackle this problem. As an experiment, I’m going to try out making a form of architectural decision record for some of my personal choices.

As the choices I’m thinking about revolve around tools and productivity-oriented processes in my life, making ADRs seems like a natural choice. It likely seems a bit analytical, but for me it makes sense to get my thoughts down in a more concrete format. Having them stored in a notebook so I can come back to them later and see if my thoughts on things have changed would also be helpful.

Time to set up a folder in Obsidian and make some decisions. The first one is going to be pretty meta and common: an ADR on choosing to use ADRs.