How does a few minutes a week change the trajectory of your life?
...and how the heck did I drop that time to reflect every week?
I was binge-watching the final season of Billions last week and a character said something that reminded me of a habit I’ve built and completely lapsed on for the last year and a half or so…
Y’know, Billions as a show to analyze how people work on their mental stamina and ideas is probably at least a couple of posts, but that’s a separate one. :-)
In one of the episodes, Kate Sacker - a character on the show - talks about how she realized something because when she was doing her weekly analysis of decisions, she recognized that something was off in the way she made one.
It’s that weekly analysis part that hit me.
One of my favorite sayings is that there’s a big difference between “1 years experience 20 times, and 20 years experience” and I’ve always believed that taking the time to look back at the decisions you make can be the difference between improving at something or continuing to repeat the same mistakes.
I’ve also held this in the context of product decisions. It’s impossible to know if you’re good at making those if you also don’t have a practice of going back and analyzing all the decisions you made (months and years ago sometimes) to know what you do well or badly.
A couple of years ago, I realized it wasn’t just important to think about decisions systematically but also people - what motivated them, what they might actually be thinking, how they may have changed etc.
While I still do this ad-hoc, not having a fixed time and weekly practice of doing it means I’ve missed out on some stuff and more importantly haven’t been comprehensive in my work.
So I added a calendar block at the end of the week to do this now, where separately I’ll catalog and analyze decisions (product and people) that I made, things (discussions, meetings, docs etc.) I did and saw and people that I care about.
Here’s hoping to keep up the ritual!
Do you have a personal reflection/analysis ritual you like?