If you’re not reflecting, you’re just reacting, letting others put things on your calendar.
Self-reflection is critical for ensuring you spend your time on things that align with your goals, without burning out in the process. You can learn things about yourself, discover areas for improvement, and set goals for the future.
This post describes my process for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly reflection. Reflection is a deeply personal process. This post is meant as an inspiration – you can adapt the process to your own needs.
Daily reflection
Daily reflection is done by writing down the things I have on my mind and tracking my mood. This kind of journaling is helpful for expressing your emotions in a safe private space. I have a reminder set for each morning to do this.
As part of daily journaling, I create an all-day calendar event, whose name is a number from 1 to 10 to summarize in one number how I am feeling (both mentally and physically). In the event description, I reflect on what I accomplished the previous day, how I am feeling, what is bothering me, or what I am excited to work on. I don’t have structure and don’t force myself to write a specific length – just do whatever feels right.
Over time, you will learn more about yourself: how a week of high mood is often followed by a week of low mood, or how, despite positive or negative things happening, the mood quickly goes back to the 7-8 baseline.
The all-day event is helpful as it stays at the top of the calendar screen, making it easy to look back in time and see how I felt on a particular day. That also brings us to the next point – weekly reflection.
Weekly reflection
While journaling is great for daily reflection, I also take the time to do weekly reflection to look back on how I spent my week and how I want to improve in the following weeks. Here it helps to have a bit more structure to ensure you cover the important topics.
I divide it into personal reflection and work reflection:
Weekly personal reflection
I set soft-skills and hard-skills goals for the year. To ensure I stay on track, I reflect on my progress on them each week. Some of my goals for this year (a few redacted for privacy):
- Career goals:
- Write great technical documentation for soft influence
- Patterns, designs, best practices
- Contributing and high-level design decisions
- Create a changelog to improve visibility
- Deliver great on
<my current project>– do this ASAP to unblock teammates and get to the next large project faster - Prepare for the planetary presentation early next year
- Personal goals:
- Exercise more (1hr/day → 2hr) or exercise smarter
- Soft skills
- Read 5 books on the subject and apply
- Write down blog posts based on areas I have experience in (list of post ideas:
<future post ideas>) - Learn English
- Re-learn grammar, spelling
- Improve accent
If I don’t make progress on some of them for a few weeks, I need to course-correct or adjust the goal.
The best way to stay on track is to put them on your calendar! My examples:
- Schedule daily exercise time. Also, schedule weekly “exercise: research” time where I reflect on what exercise I am doing, and what I can do to improve it (like varying body focus areas, or adding new exercises to target under-trained areas).
- Buy books on soft skills and add them to my queue.
- Schedule daily time to improve English pronunciation.
- Schedule monthly time to write a blog post.
- At the start of the weekend, I have a reminder to plan what tasks I want to accomplish this weekend: catch up with family, chores, learning something new, personal projects, or just a productive rest time. Though most of the time I just choose to tackle some work project to catch up and get ahead.
Weekly work reflection
Great prompt questions:
- What tasks I accomplished for my level of seniority?
- What tasks I accomplished that grow me to the next level of seniority?
- Then, for each of the growth areas I set to get me to the next level of seniority, write an example of what I accomplished for each of them. My current topics:
- Prioritize. Don’t waste time on little impact things.
- Teach people to solve a problem rather than solve it for them.
- Deliver tailored communication for changes impacting outside my team.
- Don’t sacrifice team velocity when prioritizing personal velocity.
- Prioritize deep technical projects over shallow work. Automate away shallow where possible.
- Keep track of important internal/external industry changes and anticipate them, but don’t spend too much time on this.
- Ask for input on
<my project name>decisions before proceeding (multiple brains is better, and helps with buy-in). - Mentor/coordinate others.
- Praise others publicly.
- Learn company politics more.
- Continue rapidly gaining more experience.
- What processes I improved/automated/documented? How I made
<my project name>more accessible to others?
- How much enjoyment and fulfillment did I receive? How can I increase that? What areas am I passionate about?
- What mistakes did I make and what did I learn from them?
- Am I behind on any task? Should I notify any team member about that?
These are amazing for ensuring I work toward the career goals I set, I work on the tasks I enjoy, and I keep track of the tasks that might be due soon. The answers to these questions are then the basis for a weekly report to my manager and also are a starting point for a yearly review.
Monthly reflection
Given that I already answer a lot of questions each week, monthly reflection only adds a few more questions – mainly things that require a bit longer time horizon:
- Look back at the calendar for the past month and reflect on my common activities.
- Which were the most important/impactful and should be prioritized/done more of?
- Which were negative and should be reduced/eliminated?
- What is the status of my goals/projects?
- What can I do to reduce task-switching/context-switching – it’s decreasing productivity
- What should I do to buy more time?
Yearly reflection
Yearly reflection is the time to reflect on the past year, and set the goals for the next 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, and 20 years. Of course, the further away you go, the less specificity you can have and the more often the goals will change, but it is still important to have long-term goals so that you can remind yourself each morning what you are working toward.
When I am feeling down, I take time to look at the long-term goals I set to remind myself what this is all for.
“Yearly reflection” does not mean you have to do it on January 1st. Do what aligns with how you like to think about yourself. I prefer to plan on my birthday. This way I can see how much I accomplished by a certain age, and what I want to accomplish by a given age. This helps because while a year number like “2032” is abstract, the “30th birthday” is a much more concrete and powerful number – makes it much easier to visualize what you want to accomplish by that date.
Yearly reflection is the most important one – and that is why I am spending two full days (entire weekend) on it – well worth it. Think of it like this:
- yearly reflection is the time you decide what the next year will be spent working on – it is better to spend 2 days ensuring you work on the right goals, rather than wasting an entire year working on the wrong things.
There are many great articles online on what to do during the yearly reflection. I improve the process each year. Here is my current process:
Review the calendar for the past year
- Identify what I spent the most time on. My hyper-scheduling habit and tools for analyzing where the time went help a lot with this.
- Read daily, weekly, and monthly reflections.
- Based on these reflections, as well as weekly updates sent to my manager, make a list of accomplishments to quote during the yearly review process at work.
- Sort the activities I did by their impact.
- Take all “positive” impact activities and schedule more of them. Put them on the calendar, or on the weekly reflection list – ensure they don’t get crowded out by other tasks.
- Take “negative” and reduce/eliminate them. Don’t let others pressure you into wasting your time on these.
Life timeline
Keep a timeline of significant personal events during the year – I keep it in a spreadsheet. This makes it easy to reflect at the past 10 years down the line. Think about it like this: if you were to write an autobiography in 40 years, what information would be interesting and important?
Wheel of Life exercise
Do a “The Wheel of Life” exercise. You can find templates online. I like to do it using a spreadsheet.
Identify sections of your life:
- social
- family
- best friends
- friends
- colleagues
- community
- relationships
- career
- work subject
- job environment
- deep work
- responsibilities, title
- contribution, impact
- finances
- assets, financial security
- lack of debt
- organization
- emotional health
- level of motivation
- level of optimism about the future
- lack of burnout
- lack of stress
- feeling about life
- physical health
- exercise
- level of energy
- nutrition
- sleep
- health
- recreation
- positive hobbies
- effective recreation
- physical environment
- home
- roommates
- city, region, state, country, planet
- weather
- independence
- education
- existing talent and skills
- social skills
- personality & character traits
- rate of growth
- productivity, routine, schedule
- scheduling, methods, tools
- values, purpose, impact
For each section, set a number:
- 1-10 – where you are currently on this section.
- 1-10 – where you would ideally want to be in a year. This is important for grounding – you cannot be 10/10 in all sections. During different parts of your life, you may focus on career, social, or health differently – that is already, and this number should reflect that.
- Based on the above two numbers, make the spreadsheet compute how much is the difference between where you are now and where you want to be?
- 1-10 – how much effort did you put in? This is the eye-opening part – if a delta between where you want to be and where you are is huge, and yet you did not put much effort, you now have a clear TODO for the next year.
- Next to each line I have a free-form field to reflect on the numbers.
Then, make a few simple charts to visualize how satisfied you are with each area of your life compared to how much effort you put in.
Reflect on the present
Write short answers for things that come to mind for the following prompts:
- Situation now
- Main projects now
- Main problems/concerns now
- Main obstacles, bottlenecks. What holds you back? (external/internal)
Reflect on the past
- What advice would you give to yourself from a year ago? Lessons learned
- Regrets?
- Luckiest moments. Most grateful for…
- Best decision made
- Risks taken
- Surprises
- Challenges
- Professional accomplishment (skills, habits, learnings)
- Personal accomplishments
- Most influential in-person people (positive & negative)
- Most influential remote people (positive & negative)
I try to avoid pronouns and articles, and even use incomplete sentences as I find that less distracting.
Think about the future
- Hoping … stays the same
- Hoping … changes
- If this is your last year…
- Great things expected to happen?
- Great things going to make happen?
- Travel plans
- Most important goal for next year
Reflect on your happiness
- … brings happiness
- Happiest moments, fun things
- Unhappiest moments
- Motivation sources
Reflect on your character
- Want to change … about myself
- … talent would like to have
- Compliments received
- Strengths
- Weaknesses
Re-read the previous year’s reflection
It is easy to get lost in the moment and forget how far you have come. Re-reading the previous year’s reflection helps you:
- See how much you accomplished
- See how much you changed
- Identify the future goals
Setting goals
Update the list of the long-term goals based on this reflection. For each (specific and measurable goal) think:
- Why important
- How it will change me
- How to quantify progress
- How confident I am in achieving it
- Possible failure reasons
- … behaviors support it
- … behaviors hinder it
- What to set in motion now to get closer to the goal
- Ideal future. How to get there
I hope this helps to serve as an inspiration for your own self-reflection processes.
I wish you to have the time to plan for the goals you desire 🎯, and the energy to execute them ⚡!