I often go through my week just trying to work on the things I need to work on, and more-than-occassionally I end up watching youtube videos for hours on end. In the morning, I feel motivated to work, but then after lunch I feel like I've deserved a break so I watch a youtube video, and after that finishes, the food coma starts to kick in, so another video is easily justified, and after the second video, my brain is even more stimulated and not thinking critically, and it becomes almost impossible to pry my eyes off youtube, and I end up squandering my entire afternoon.
Almost every single one of my days followed this pattern, and I knew things were wrong and that I had to change them, but there were always more videos to watch and I always felt tired so I made that excuse of not wanting to enact a significant change in my lifestyle that isn't fully thought out. So I just kept doing this, day after day, and once it got to the point where I just watched videos in the morning, afternoon, and night, I told myself that something really has to change, and fast. This was right before finals, so I knew that if I didn't change, I would end the semester off poorly then my entire summer would just fly by without me ever really thinking about what I wanted to do. This is why I started my weekly reflections, and oh man has it changed my life.
They're just reflections on your week. Depending on where you are in life and what your goals are, the type of reflection you might want to do varies, so I'll describe what has worked for me and the three sections that I think make a reflection session productive. The first section is summarizing your week. For me, I list out any notable accomplishments ranging from work on projects to webtoons I read to progress on hobbies. I also list things that I learned that week because learning is tied with many of my goals, so tracking this aspect of my life is a good indicator of how I'm progressing towards the person I want to be. If there are any goals or parts of your life that you want to be keeping track of, you can talk about your week in the context of those things.
The point of this summarization section is to remember what I've done during the week so that I can accurately reflect on what I've done. I try and be specific enough that I can come back in a year and easily remember what I did that week, making the summarization double as a reminder of my accomplishments each week which I can later revisit and analyze, letting me visualize your goals on a larger scale.
After the week's happenings are fresh in my mind, I start analyzing them. The whole point of reflection is to put us on track to accomplish our long term goals, so a good starting point is analyzing the week with respect to our goals. For this summer, I have 3 goals for each of the 3 areas of fulfillment so I analyze my week in context of each of those goals and think about what went well, what went poorly, and what I can improve on. I enjoy treating this section as a creative, freeform area where in addition to reflecting on the past week, I can also explore ideas and go down rabbit holes that might result in exciting ways to improve my efficiency or well-being.
A common goal modern day humans have is the endevour to become more productive. For me, it helps to reflect on any patterns I notice in my work schedule. Recently, I started taking hour by hour notes of what I do throughout the day, and this has helped me finding numerous optimizations that I apply to my daily life. One example is when I was looking at my hourly schedules and saw many days where the entire morning was straight, productive work while the afternoon and night were much more variable. I had always known I was a morning person but I didn't realize how much of a difference that meant in the work I produced, so now I work on my most cognitively straining tasks first thing in the morning.
This past Sunday, I noticed another pattern where most days, I take long breaks after lunch and dinner (food coma hits hard), but then on a few days, I manage to work well right after meals. This discrepency hinted to me that either food coma is less of a detriment to working that I had previously thought, or that my work schedule is just super variable. Considering that morning are very consistent for me, I'm guessing that I'm overestimating food coma. Now I'm experimenting with working for 5 minutes right after meals and then making a decision about whether or not to keep working or take a break, and just few days in, I've already been getting much more mileage out of my normaly unproductive afternoons and nights. Just remembering what I did over the week is a nice exercise, but actively searching for trends and new ideas helps identify actionable areas to improve on, which brings us to our last section.
Now that we have an assortment of analysis and improvements we can make to our lives, it's time to create a few specific goals for the following week, emphasis on "few" and "specific" (and technically "goals" as well). [1] Even if we've found a hundred high-quality improvements, it's near impossible to implement all of them and have any stick without an absurd amount of willpower. After dozens and dozens of attempts, I can confirm that setting fewer specific goals is much more likely to result in lasting change.
Another thing I like to do is reflect on the previous session's goals. Setting goals and then forgetting about them probably hurts more than it helps, so this goal-checking encourages me to have something to show for the end of the week. Also, goals set in weekly reflections tend to be related to long term goals, so even if I wasn't able to work towards my goals this week, I could work on it the following week and still receive the benefits that I would have had. [2]
The most important section out of the three is the analysis section because it's where we do most of the reflecting. The inputs are the summarization of the week, and the outputs are actionable items, and even if the inputs or outputs aren't high-quality, simply thinking about your life in the past week is a great exercise in training your introspective muscles. After a few weeks, I've found myself noticing more patterns and being more aware of what I'm doing and thinking, which creates a positive feedback loop in my weekly reflections as I have more fuel to analyze and more brain power to generate even better fuel.
So what does this all look like in action? As you go about your week, try and note down what you did each day and any interesting thoughts you have. It can be a quick 10 second summary of your day or you can have an existential crisis and write a book, but try and write at least something down each day to create a habit. The next step is to pick a day of the week (I've found Sunday morning to work well as the mind is fresh) to spend an hour or two reflecting on what you wrote down over the week and whatever else you remember or notice, and go through what was said above in summarizing, analyzing, and creating a few specific goals for the next week. When next week rolls around, make sure to reference your goals every once in a while and jot down any progress you make on them. After that week is finished, rinse and repeat and continue improving and moving towards your goals.
The most important part of weekly reflections are not the goals, but the consistency — even if every step you take is small, as long as you're headed in the right direction, it's progress.
1: I dislike the connotation of a "goal" as it implies a fixed end and discounts the journey. I like "actionable item" better as the focus should be on the action of improving and working towards a goal, but I use the term "goals" for brevity's and consistency's sake. ↩
2: Putting off something for next week is a bad mindset as things will get indefinitely delayed, but acknowledging that you should have done something earlier and are now willing to follow through with it is respectable. ↩