Brutalist CISO Notes

A CISO's Minimal Notes Method

You don't need a second brain. You need operational memory.

Complex note-taking systems collapse under CISO-level pressure. You don't have time to curate, tag, link, and maintain a knowledge archive. So you don't. And then the context disappears.

This is a different approach: capture fast, preserve decisions, drive action.

Four symbols. One note per day.

* context, signals, constraints, political realities + decisions made, with rationale -> actions, with owner and timeframe ? open decisions

That's it. No folders. No tags. No taxonomy. Search handles retrieval (search “->” for actions, “+” for decisions, and “*” for context.).

Example note:

Friday 2026-01-16 * Board is nervous about the vendor breach — legal flagged reputational exposure * Procurement froze new SaaS approvals pending security review + Decided to scope emergency review to Tier 1 vendors only — full review not feasible before earnings call -> Alice to send vendor questionnaires by EOD Friday -> Bob to draft board update slide by Monday ? Do we pause the Okta renewal or proceed under current terms Met with Cloud Engineering * Shadow AWS accounts still appearing from acquired teams -> Pull unmanaged account list + owners. Cloud Ops by Mon + Allow temporary prod access exception - blocking revenue deploy - 60-day sunset

Weekly review: five minutes.

Grep for "->". For each action, confirm it's done, abandoned, or reassigned. Move on.

Why it works

Memory distorts intent. Six months later you won't remember why you made a call, just that you made it. This method captures the reasoning at the moment it happens. That's your defensible executive record when the incident hits, when the CEO asks, when you're running on four hours of sleep.

It survives board meetings, post-mortems, and organizational churn. An unmaintained archive doesn't.

Any tool works. Pen and paper, a plain text editor, a basic notes app. The format is what matters, not the tool. I use Auer Notes (I wrote it to be simple, private, and to support this method).

No summaries. No transcripts. No knowledge gardening. Just what’s going on, what was decided, and what must move. If your app pushes you to organize, tag, decorate, backlink, or curate, it is working against you.

This isn’t a second brain; it’s operational memory.

And for a CISO, that’s what actually compounds.