Brief's navigation has a group called Decide, and it holds five entries. Commitments is what you owe other people and what they owe you. Topics groups related work into subjects Brief recognized across your email and messages. Goals is marked "Coming soon" and is not live yet. Those three explain themselves on sight, and Where to find everything in Brief maps the whole navigation if you want the tour.
This article is about the other two, Decisions and Questions. They keep records rather than lists of work, which makes them less obvious and easier to skip past.
What Brief records as a decision
Brief reads your email, messages, and meetings, and when something in them amounts to a decision, it writes that down. You do not record anything yourself.
Two different things sit on the Decisions page, and it helps to know that before you open it.
Decisions that were made. The ordinary case. Somebody decided something and Brief has the record of it.
Decisions still being worked out. Brief also records a decision nobody has made yet, but only once something concrete has attached to it: an owner, an option on the table, or a position somebody has taken. Until one of those exists there is nothing to record but a subject.
The second kind is why the page earns a visit. A decision already made is not at risk. One still in progress is the kind that goes quiet on you, and you can only notice it went quiet if something kept a record while it was still open.
When a decision gets revised rather than replaced, it stays on the page as the same decision, marked amended. The history stays attached to it instead of starting over.
Where decisions appear, and where they do not
Decisions show up on the Decisions page and in Brief's search. They do not appear in your daily briefing email, on a person's page, or in a meeting's briefing.
That is worth knowing early, because otherwise it looks like something is broken. If you read the daily email and nothing else, you will never see a decision — not because Brief captured none, but because the email does not carry them. The Decisions page is the list to go to.
Reading the Decisions page
Two dropdowns sit above the list.
Status starts on Live: decisions that were made, decisions that were made and later amended, and decisions still being worked out. Switch it to All to also see the ones that have dropped out of that set — a decision that was reversed, one replaced by a later decision, one nobody ever settled, and any left untouched so long that Brief aged it off the Live list.
Sort starts on Newest and can be switched to Oldest. There is also a search box that searches the decisions themselves.
What Brief records as an open question
An open question is something that still needs an answer, from you or from somebody else.
That includes the questions you asked in your own email and never got a reply to, which is the group people are most surprised to find. You asked, nobody answered, and the thread moved on without it.
A question can be closed three ways, and Brief keeps them separate on purpose.
Answered. You record the answer. Brief asks you to write it down, because the answer is the whole point of keeping the record.
Resolved by a decision. The question was settled by a decision Brief recorded, and Brief notes which one. The two stay linked, so you can trace an answer back to where it was actually made.
Dismissed. It was never a real question, or it stopped mattering.
Why a question can leave the list on its own
There is a fourth way a question leaves the list, and it is not a closure at all. A question nobody touches for long enough drops off the open list by itself, and it comes straight back the moment you touch it again.
Brief keeps that separate from dismissing, deliberately. A question that went quiet and a question you rejected are two different facts about your work. It also means a short list is not proof that everything on it got resolved.
This is the same distinction the daily brief draws when you dismiss an item there. See Tuning your daily brief for that side of it.
Reading the Questions page
Status starts on Open and can be switched to All. Sort starts on Importance and can be switched to Newest or Oldest. Importance first is the right default on a first visit, because the list is usually longer than you expect.
If your account is new, both pages can sit empty for a while. The first sync has to read your history before anything lands here, and an empty Questions page just reads "No open questions." See Getting started with Brief for what that first sync does.
What these two pages are for
They hold the work that has nowhere else to live. A commitment has an owner and usually a deadline. A task goes on a task list. A decision that was made and a question nobody answered have neither, which is exactly why both tend to vanish.
If you are opening these for the first time, start with Questions sorted by importance. An unanswered question is usually a person waiting on you with no reminder attached.