Verdict — Decision Journal

A private decision journal. Write it down, let time pass, come back to see the outcome. Learn where your instincts were right, and where they missed.

Verdict is a small, deliberate journal for one intellectual habit: writing down what you expect to happen before you decide, then coming back weeks or months later to see whether the world agreed with you.

This habit is not new. Charlie Munger has spent sixty years insisting that inversion, asking how would this fail before how would this succeed, is the single most useful trick in decision-making. Ray Dalio built one of the largest hedge funds in history around the discipline of writing down failure modes before committing. Psychologist Gary Klein calls it a pre-mortem. Verdict gives the habit a place to live and a shape to hold.

WHAT IS INSIDE

Record a decision. One line title, a pre-mortem, mental weight, a settlement period. That is the whole ritual.

Take field notes during the settlement period. A sentence when things change, timestamped automatically. When you come back to review, you see the whole timeline, not just what you thought on day zero.

Review honestly. Score 1 to 10. Would you do it again. One principle you would hand to your future self.

Vault. Every principle you have extracted, accumulating over time into your own set. Not quotes from other people. Yours.

Case studies. Five real decisions from Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, and Jeff Bezos. Free. Written as editorial prose, not bullet points.

Insight. A soft calibration chart showing how confident you were versus how right you actually were, over time. Domain-level regret rates. Your own circle of competence, drawn from evidence rather than pride.

VERDICT PRO, ONE-TIME PURCHASE

Paid once. Never a subscription. Less than two months of any comparable notes app.

Read as a Book. Your Vault as a bound edition, one principle per page. This is the piece worth screenshotting.

Advanced Insight. Quarterly calibration comparison, decision quality timeline, risk-preference profile.

PDF editions. A5 booklet, Kindle format, hardcover style, gift edition.

Two Pro themes. Ember Press and Midnight.

Custom review reminders. Multi-tier, mid-cycle nudges, time of your choosing.

Home Screen widget. See what is fermenting without opening the app.

WHAT VERDICT DOES NOT DO

No accounts. No servers. No tracking. No analytics. No AI writing anything for you. No push notifications that treat you like you need to be nagged. No streaks, no badges, no dopamine hooks.

Verdict runs entirely on-device. Your decisions sync between your iPhones through iCloud, using Apple private CloudKit. The developer never sees your data. The app contains no analytics SDK of any kind.