The Value of Reflecting

This year, the third of #my3words is Pulse. I chose it to remind me to reflect more often. Like a lot of us, I tend to charge forward and not spend a lot of time looking back, which is silly, because I keep two journals solely so that I can keep information worth looking back at when I want.

I thought I'd share why it matters.

You Find Patterns When You Reflect

There's something about repetition of any kind. They say Bruce Lee's daily workout included 5000 punches and 2000 kicks. Every single day. I know from writing that my act of writing 2000 words a day every day means that I can put out great volumes of content without a lot of sweat. Repetition builds capabilities that you can't get other ways.

The same is true from looking at my journal. I uncovered a kind of weird thing by way of reflecting today. I noticed that any time I write about fun or play or trying to see the world in a lighter way, I freeze up. Nothing follows my sentence about, "What ways could I put more fun in my life in 2024?" It's blank. I didn't write another word in the journal that day. Odd, right?

I got something positive or at least interesting as well. I decided I doubt I'll ever want to do anything resembling a startup ever again. I'd rather fix up old or failing businesses, coach up executives, work on stuff that exists but needs repair. I'm just not interested in starting something new. Too much fizz.

I wouldn't have picked up either without reflecting on what I'd written in my journal.

See at Different Scales

Ryder Carroll who created the Bullet Journal method posted a little video clip talking about a new "view" in his journal that will allow him to track at a year's scale. That's interesting to me. His idea is just to take two pages in your journal and make the left side the first two quarters of the year and the right side the last two quarters of the year. Like this.

See? It's easy. But what it DOES is gives you a quarter by quarter view of the year. That's the magic part. It lets you reflect and forecast and think on a much bigger scale than weekly.

Reflection is about that - seeing things from different angles, different views, looking for patterns.

New Tools for Different Reflections

While I wrote this, I got a question from Cody about Obsidian and how I set up a daily note there. This turned into a question about how I organize my notes. I pointed out that one benefit of the digital note system I use is that you can use hashtags, links, and all kinds of other methods to build visual graphs of how notes connect.

Sometimes, reflecting means finding the larger nodes visually and learning that you sure did link to and from a specific piece of information (suggesting that maybe that piece of information is somehow more meaningful than others, I guess).

There's lots to consider.

Weekly. Monthly. Quarterly. Annually

Another point about reflection: one of the details missing from life that exists in video games is a faster feedback loop. That's one reason people like playing games. You know rather quickly whether you're doing well or not. If you set your life up to reflect upon it weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly, then you really start getting a chance to cook.

I say all the time: "Your day is your week is your month is your year." What you're doing today is what will add up to the 366 chances you have to win by the end of this year.

By setting up a weekly, monthly, and quarterly reflection/review cadence, it means you'll have a better chance of landing at your annual lookback with better information. Right?

It's powerful. That's my plan this year, anyway. In my reflection today, I note that maybe 1/3 of the items I wrote about this week in my private journal were about family and loved ones, 1/3 about the world around me, and 1/3 about thoughts and ideas. That's interesting to me. I like it.

What about you? How often do you reflect?

Chris...