Daily Retrospection & Feedback Loops

We need to reflect more. Most people I know go through their day in a purely forward-pass manner, where they simply float from one activity to the next with a very local sense of purpose (what should I make for lunch? I hope I finish this assignment before it’s due at midnight!, etc). But beyond our hour by hour musings and hopes, we often neglect to look back over the day in its entirety.

Blundering through life this way decreases accountability and blurs the very concept of time. Have you ever had that feeling of going through an entire week and being unable to think back to a single concrete thing you did that expanded your world view, furthered a passion, or was just plain fulfilling? I know this has certainly happened to me, and it’s terrifying. The very idea that life can slip by unnoticed like that is probably one of my worst fears… waking up one day and wondering where the heck did all this time go?

I believe that daily retrospection is a necessity to hold yourself accountable to the day. At the very least, I personally try and pen down the answers to the following questions at the end of my day:

• What were my “Three Wins” for the day? What did I accomplish? What did I learn? Did something expand my world-view?
• What is something that didn’t go so well today? What did I learn from it, and how can I make sure it doesn’t happen tomorrow?

Even if you answer “Nothing” or “Don’t know” to many of these, the very practice of asking gets you in the mode of “searching” for the answers to these questions in life - which is a helpful way of holding yourself accountable to the day.

We can use this retrospection to backpropagate (if you know, you know ;) the successes and failures of the day - fine tuning the cogs in our daily practices.

But really this is all about feedback loops. You see a feedback loop is simply a chance for you to self-correct after looking or reflecting on performance. You see it all the time when basketball players are perfecting their jump shot. They take a shot, they reflect… and shoot again making minor adjustments each time.

By doing a daily restrospection you can shorten the feedback loop to one day - making minute changes every 24 hrs. Over a lifetime this is huge. Everybody else usually only course corrects when something bad happens (receive a failing grade, lose their job, etc). Then it is common to think, “Well, I better change my habbits going forward.” While failure certainly is a heuristic to trigger change, an even more effective way to see compounding change is simply to analyze your day’s events before going to bed. Asking yourself even a fraction of the questions above, can help you highlight areas of improvement without needing a large setback or failure to trigger change.