The Daily Decision Framework

Brooks Gaye is a productivity coach, writer, and former operations director who has spent more than a decade helping overwhelmed professionals make better decisions with less agony. The Daily Decision Framework grew directly out of that work: first as a set of habits Brooks used to manage teams under constant deadline pressure, then as a coaching tool for clients who arrived exhausted, stuck, and certain that they were simply "bad at decisions."

Across fifteen years of working with managers, founders, and high-performing individual contributors, Brooks developed a straightforward observation: the people who seemed to decide effortlessly were not smarter or more decisive by nature — they simply had a structure they trusted, while everyone else was improvising. That insight became this book.

Brooks has taught the framework to hundreds of clients across tech, healthcare, education, and the creative industries, and has written extensively on decision-making, focus, and the psychology of busy work. A recovering maximizer who once spent three days choosing a backpack, Brooks now subscribes to the framework's own principle: name the decision, set the criteria, set a deadline, and move on — which is also, conveniently, how this book came to exist. Brooks writes a weekly newsletter on practical decision-making for busy professionals, and lives for slow mornings, long walks, and a calendar with plenty of empty space.