Find the Decisions Buried in Your Inbox

Someone asks, in a meeting, whether you ever agreed to push the launch to the 15th. You think so. You're pretty sure. There was a thread (forty messages, three vendors, two people who've since left) and somewhere in the middle of it, between a calendar reschedule and a thank-you reply, the date got settled.

You go looking. You scroll. You read a paragraph you wrote six weeks ago and don't recognize. Twenty minutes later you find it: yes, the 15th, confirmed by the vendor, agreed by you. The decision was always there. You just couldn't see it under everything else.

Most decisions get made in email threads and forgotten within a week. Not because email is bad at recording them (it records everything) but because it records everything equally. The decision and the noise sit in the same font.

The thread wasn't the problem. The habit of treating email as a transcript you'll somehow remember was. The fix is to stop reading threads and start interrogating them.

#A thread is a record, not a memory