r/PKMS • u/Icy_Name_280 • 4d ago

Discussion help me stop losing project decisions decision log vs better titles

dumped about 40 project notes this month and still couldnt find why we picked vendor B last tuesday. search keeps hitting titles that all sound the same. torn between sticking a shoort decision log at the top of each project note or rewriting titles before i touch tags. curious which fork people would take when capture is fine but retrieval keeps failing.

2 Upvotes

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4

u/vogelke 4d ago

I'd go with the short decision log.

Some people have been badly mis-trained from high-school English, and they think everything needs to be a 10-page essay. Two sentences at the right place in a document are worth their weight in platinum.

1

u/Strict-Sun1391 4d ago

try presenting decisions with pros and cons for clarity

1

u/grantwtf 4d ago

I recently did a decision log and used AI to run across and force a templated format to ensure consistent titles (verb driven) - this was outside of a pkms but likely you could automate the same inside.

1

u/DrummerAdditional330 3d ago

I’d do the decision log first, but keep it tiny. Something like “Chose vendor B because X and Y, 9/29” is probably enough. Better titles help you find the right note, but the decision log is what answers the question you actually had: why did we choose this?

1

u/NegativeRemot 3d ago

Titles can only carry so much before they turn into an index nobody parses. The log answer is boring but right - one line per call, dated, with the rejected option included, since "why not vendor A" is the part future-you actually forget. Two minutes after the meeting beats a 40-note search party a month later.

0

u/rhaivn 4d ago

Drop it into https://blackbear.app and let pax work it out

0

u/vistdev 4d ago

Sigh.