Eloise Marchetti keeps a decision journal the way a tournament player keeps a scoresheet: one line per move, no commentary during play, all judgment deferred to the review. This quarter’s sheet has twelve entries. The question is how to mark them.
1. The sheet is not the game
In chess, annotation symbols are suffixes added to a move after the game, not during it. The move itself is recorded in algebraic notation — the standard system that names the piece and the square, like Nf3 for a knight to f3 — and the symbols are editorial marks layered on top during review. The FIDE Laws of Chess require players to record moves in algebraic notation during serious over-the-board play (FIDE, Laws of Chess, Article 8), but the Laws do not assign quality grades. That work belongs to the annotator.
The symbols most players know are ! (a strong move, often the only good one), ? (a mistake), !? (interesting and probably good, but not clearly best), and ?! (dubious — playable, but asking for trouble). These are conventions of published chess literature, not codified rules. That looseness is exactly why they transfer well to a household ledger: they were always editorial, never legal.
2. Twelve moves, four marks
A quarter has roughly ninety days. Twelve decisions is one per week, which is about the rate at which a household makes choices that actually change its position: a sofa purchase, a cabinet purge, a mail triage system, an insurance renewal, a budget audit, a subscription cancellation, a repair-or-replace call, a savings-rate adjustment, a childcare schedule, a tax-document filing, a gift budget, a recurring-donation review.
Score each one with a single suffix. The suffix describes the decision process, not the outcome. This is the whole discipline. A move can be ! and still lose; a move can be ? and still work out. The journal records the quality of the reasoning at the moment of choice, using only information available then.
3. ! — the move you would play again
Mark a decision ! when, given the same information and the same constraints, you would make it again without hesitation. The sofa you bought after measuring the doorway, checking the return window, and sitting on three candidates in the store is a ! even if the fabric pills in month four. The measurement was the move. The pilling is the opponent’s reply.
Keep the bar high. If every entry is !, the journal has become a scrapbook. A useful test: name the alternative you rejected and the reason. If you cannot name both, the move is not ! — it is unannotated, which is worse than ?.
4. ? — the move that lost material
Mark a decision ? when the reasoning had a hole you can now see. The mail pile is the classic case. You decided to “deal with it later,” and later became a stack of unopened envelopes on the hall table, and the stack became a late fee on a utility bill. The decision was not the late fee. The decision was the deferral, made on a Tuesday, with no rule about what “later” meant.
A ? is not a moral verdict. It is a flag that says: this move had a defect, and the defect is nameable. Write the defect in the margin. “No trigger for when later arrives.” “Assumed the renewal notice would come by email.” “Did not check the cabinet depth before ordering the bins.” The margin note is the actual product of the journal. The symbol is just the index.
5. ?! — the move that works until it doesn’t
Mark a decision ?! when it is defensible but fragile. The sofa negotiation is the model. You and your partner agreed to split the cost and defer the decision to next month. That is playable. It also leaves the living room in a holding pattern, and holding patterns have a way of becoming permanent. The move is not wrong. It is asking for trouble.
?! is the most useful symbol in the set because it catches the decisions that never generate a crisis and therefore never get reviewed. A budget audit that reallocates the same three categories every quarter without touching the fourth is ?!. A cabinet that gets reorganized every spring and re-cluttered by summer is ?!. The pattern is the tell: the move repeats because the underlying position was never changed.
6. !? — the move you cannot yet grade
Mark a decision !? when it looks promising but the position is unresolved. You cancelled a subscription and redirected the money to a savings transfer. Six weeks in, the transfer is happening and the subscription is gone. That is !? — interesting, probably good, not yet proven. Revisit it next quarter. If the transfer survives a second quarter, promote it to !. If it quietly stopped, demote it to ? and write the reason.
The !? pile is where a decision journal earns its keep. Most household decisions are neither clearly good nor clearly bad at the moment they are made. Without a symbol for “pending,” they get filed as successes by default, and the journal stops teaching anything.
7. The scoring grid
At the end of the quarter, lay the twelve entries in a four-column grid. One column per symbol. Count the entries. The counts are not a grade; they are a position assessment.
| Symbol | Meaning | What the count tells you |
|---|---|---|
| ! | Would repeat | Your process is holding. Check that the bar is real. |
| ?! | Fragile but playable | Look for repeats. A pattern of ?! is a structural problem. |
| !? | Unresolved | Carry forward. These are next quarter’s first review items. |
| ? | Nameable defect | Read the margin notes. One defect repeated is a rule waiting to be written. |
A healthy quarter is not all !. It is a spread that matches the actual difficulty of the decisions. If you have no ?, you are either playing a very easy game or not annotating honestly. If you have no !?, you are grading too fast.
8. The transferable rule
Write the symbol at the moment of review, not the moment of decision. The decision gets a date, a one-line description, and the information you had. The symbol gets added later, when you can see the move in context. This separation is the entire method. It is also the hardest part to maintain, because the temptation to grade in real time — to feel good about a choice and mark it ! immediately — is constant.
The chess convention exists precisely because players cannot reliably assess their own moves while the clock is running. The same is true of a household. The mail pile does not know it is a ?. The sofa does not know it is a ?!. The journal knows, but only if you wait to tell it.
9. What the symbols do not do
They do not predict outcomes. A ! can be followed by a bad month. A ? can be followed by luck. The symbols grade the move, not the position. If you find yourself upgrading a ? because it worked out, you have stopped annotating and started keeping score. Those are different activities.
They also do not replace the margin note. A symbol without a reason is a mood, not a record. The reason is what makes the next quarter’s review possible. “? — deferred the insurance renewal because the notice was in the pile” is a usable entry. “? — bad call” is not.
10. The twelve-move habit
Twelve is not a magic number. It is a workable one. One decision per week is enough to produce a pattern and few enough to annotate honestly. If a quarter produces fewer than twelve decisions worth recording, record fewer. If it produces more, pick the twelve that changed your position — the ones where money moved, space changed, or a recurring obligation was created or ended.
The journal’s value is not in the symbols. It is in the habit of separating the move from the grade. That habit is the same one a chess player builds by writing the move down before knowing whether it was any good. The scoresheet does not care. The review does.
FAQ
Are the chess annotation symbols officially defined?
No. FIDE’s Laws of Chess govern how moves are recorded in algebraic notation and when recording is required, but they do not define !, ?, !?, or ?! as quality grades. Those symbols are conventions of chess literature and commentary, used by annotators to evaluate moves after the fact. Their meaning is stable in practice but not codified.
Should I annotate the decision or the outcome?
The decision. Annotate using only the information available when the choice was made. If the outcome changes your symbol, you are grading the result, not the move. Keep a separate note for outcomes if you want, but do not let it overwrite the original annotation.
What if a decision does not fit any symbol?
Leave it unannotated and write why. A decision that cannot be graded is usually one where the alternatives were never named. That is itself a finding. Next time, name the rejected alternative before deciding.
How long should I keep the journal?
Long enough to see a repeat. One quarter is the minimum for a pattern; two quarters is enough to test whether a !? should be promoted or demoted. There is no required retention period. The journal is a working document, not an archive.
Does this work for financial decisions specifically?
Yes, and the budget audit is the clearest case. A reallocation that moves the same three categories every quarter is ?! — playable, fragile, repeating. A reallocation that touches the fourth category for the first time is !? until the next quarter shows whether it held. The symbols do not require a spreadsheet. They require a date, a description, and a reason.