a decision
the thing you keep circling gets a trail. write around it each morning. pin where you land. unpin what stopped being true.
it starts untrailed
the offer came in yesterday. more money, a longer commute, a team i liked in the interview. i keep saying it is about the money and then writing two paragraphs about the commute. third morning in a row on this.
most mornings need no trail. but the third morning on the same question is a sign it is a project, not a day. a trail is for exactly that: a job search, a move, anything you'll come back to tomorrow.
the morning it gets a trail
i said the same thing about the commute on → job search:what i want from the next role. it is not about the money.
choose the trail on the page you are writing. it is new, so the first page on it picks up nothing. from here, what you pin on its pages belongs to the trail.
the record of why
unpin what stopped being true. × takes a pin off the list, and the page it came from keeps the writing, in memory, where search still finds it. letting a pin go is part of the thinking, not a failure of it.
the way back
"what i know so far" is marked ↻. choose job search for tomorrow's new page and it is already there, as a working copy to change. only pins kept on job search itself come back this way, and only once, when the page first joins the trail. pins from the untrailed mornings before it stay where they were.
why write it out
a decision you only think about goes round the same three points. on the page it cannot, because you can see that you wrote the same sentence yesterday. that is usually the moment you find out which point is the real one.
most of those mornings are not worth keeping, and they do not have to be. every page starts empty, so you can write the petty version, the scared version, the version you would never say out loud. the pins are what you decided was true, each one pointing back to the morning you worked it out. when it is done, the trail is the record of why, and it is there to read the next time.