The real cost of scattered decisions

Every time someone asks "where did we decide that?" or "can you forward the thread?", your team pays. Not in cash—in time, rework, and the slow leak of trust that comes from "I thought we agreed on the other thing."

Here's the bill.

What context switching actually costs

You've felt it. Tab to Jira. Tab to Linear. Tab to the Slack thread. Tab to the doc that might have the rationale. Tab back. By the time you've reassembled the picture, half an hour's gone and you're not even sure you're looking at the latest version.

Research puts the cost of context switching somewhere in the 20–40% range of productive time—and that's for individuals. For product teams, it's worse. Decisions aren't just in your head; they're spread across tools and people. So every "quick check" is a mini investigation. Every handoff is a risk that the next person will work from an old assumption. The price isn't one meeting. It's meetings about meetings, re-explaining the same decision, and redoing work because the rationale was never written down.

For companies, that shows up as delayed launches, duplicated effort, and PMs who spend more time hunting for context than shaping the product. For PMs, it's the constant low-grade anxiety that something important is living in a DM from three weeks ago.

Why decision logs exist (and why they usually fail)

Decision logs are the obvious fix. Write down what you decided and why. Point to it when someone asks. The idea is right. The execution is usually a mess: a doc nobody updates, a Notion page that's out of date by Thursday, or a Confluence graveyard that everyone avoids. So the log exists, but it doesn't work. People still ask. Context still scatters. The "single source of truth" is just another place to check.

We've been there. We built SIMA because we wanted a place that's for decisions first—not a side feature of a project tracker or a doc that competes with everything else. One place to capture the what and the why, link decisions together, and actually find them when it matters. No more archaeology. No more "I'll send you the thread."

What we're aiming for

Less time lost to switching. Less rework from misremembered decisions. Less "who has the context?" and more "it's in SIMA." We're not promising zero context switching—we're promising that when someone needs to know what was decided, they don't have to pay the full price again.

That's why we exist.