Decision Expiry Note

Decision Expiry Note is a small field attached to a team decision that says when the decision should be reviewed or no longer assumed to be valid.

Many workplace decisions are correct only under certain conditions. A team chooses a tool while the headcount is small, sets a meeting rule during a launch period, freezes a process because a vendor is unreliable, or agrees to a temporary handoff while someone is on leave. Months later, the original context disappears but the decision remains. People continue following it because no one knows whether it expired.

A decision expiry note should include the decision, reason, review condition, and owner. The decision is the current rule. The reason explains why it was chosen. The review condition can be a date, team size, project phase, vendor change, repeated complaint, new regulation, budget threshold, or tool migration. The owner is responsible for reopening the decision when the condition arrives.

The note is not a countdown timer for every choice. Stable principles do not need frequent expiry. Temporary processes, exceptions, pilots, launch rules, manual workarounds, and tool-specific instructions do need expiry because they are likely to outlive their usefulness.

Good expiry notes reduce passive drift. Instead of asking “Who decided this?” a teammate can ask “Has the review condition happened?” That moves the conversation from blame to maintenance.

Decision Expiry Note

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