What is tracking decisions?

Tracking decisions is a concept in personal epistemology: A log of predictions and outcomes shows you exactly where your perception is off.

Example: A product manager keeps a decision journal for six months. Every time she makes a prediction — "this feature will increase retention by 15%," "the candidate will pass the technical screen," "the client will renew" — she writes it down with a confidence level and her reasoning at that moment. Six months later, she reviews. She discovers three patterns that no amount of real-time reflection would have revealed. First, she is chronically overconfident on timeline predictions: events she said were "90% likely within two weeks" actually happened within two weeks only 55% of the time. Second, she is well-calibrated on people assessments — her 70% predictions about candidate performance resolve correctly about 68% of the time. Third, she systematically underestimates technical complexity for projects outside her domain. Without the written record, she would have remembered herself as roughly accurate across all three categories. Memory would have quietly edited her predictions to match what actually happened, and the specific, actionable pattern — overconfident on timelines, calibrated on people, underconfident on unfamiliar technical scope — would have remained invisible. The journal did not make her smarter. It made her perception of her own judgment accurate.

This concept is part of Phase 8 (Perceptual Calibration) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for perceptual calibration.