Turn a Week of Captures Into a Decision Log

What it is for

A twenty-minute weekly ritual that pulls decisions, commitments and open questions out of a week of scattered captures and writes them into one dated note. Use it if your workspace grows constantly but never answers anything. It prevents the same decision being re-argued months later because only the raw notes, not the conclusion, were ever recorded.

The skill Copy

Captures pile up. Decisions do not survive in a pile — they get
re-argued from scratch six weeks later by the same people who were
in the room. Turn the week into one log, once a week, on purpose.

Fix the time. Friday, twenty minutes, same slot.

Ask across the week's notes:

  "Go through my notes from the last 7 days. Produce three lists
   and nothing else:
   1. DECIDED — things that were settled: who decided, when, and
      which note it is in.
   2. COMMITTED — things I or someone else promised to do, with
      the person and the date promised.
   3. OPEN — questions raised that were never answered.
   Quote the sentence for each item and name the note it is in."

If the assistant cannot restrict itself to a date range, scope it
yourself: open the week's notes and work from those.

Then do the part no assistant can do — read the OPEN list and kill
it. Each open question gets answered, assigned to someone, or
deleted as no longer interesting. An open list that only grows is a
to-do list in disguise, and you will stop reading it by week four.

Write all three lists into one new note titled with the date range.
That note, not the raw captures, is what you search next quarter.

Two rules that make the log worth keeping:
  - Record the decision and what was rejected. "We chose X" ages
    badly; "we chose X over Y because Z" survives the re-argument.
  - If an item is not in a note, do not add it from memory without
    marking it RECALLED. You will be wrong about some of them.

What this prevents: a workspace that grows every week and answers
nothing, because it holds raw capture only and nobody ever decided
what the week meant.

How to install it Copy

1. Open the tool and start a new conversation, project or template.
2. Paste the text below wherever the tool keeps standing instructions
   — usually called system prompt, instructions, or persona.
3. Save it so it applies to every run rather than a single message.

Did it work for you?

Where it came from