Productivity
7 Questions to Ask Yourself About Your Day
Start with, "What did I do right?"
Posted March 31, 2016
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When you're grinding it out at work—whether at home or in an office—it's easy to fall into the trap of measuring your productivity based on how many items you tick of your ever-mushrooming to-do list. But there are many potentially more useful (and more important) ways to judge. Ask yourself some of these questions at the end of the day, or when you're planning your schedule.
1. Did you do anything today that sets you up for a big payoff in the future?
Ask yourself if you did anything that you could see as an investment—in that you expect your effort to pay you back over and over again in the future?
Examples:
- Developing or implementing strategies or approaches that will make you more productive on an ongoing basis going forward.
- Learning a new tool that will make you exponentially more productive.
2. Did you build or strengthen any important relationships today?
This is self-explanatory, but if you don't naturally prioritize relationship building and the potential value of social engineering, it's important to make this principle explicit.
3. Opportunity cost.
Even if what you did was productive, was there anything you could've spent your time doing that would've been more productive? Ask yourself: "By doing what I did today, what did I choose not to do?"
4. Did you do anything today that reflects your most important core values?
For example, if kindness is one of your most important personal values, were you especially kind to anyone during your day? This could be as simple as having spent a few minutes empathizing with a colleague who was having a bad day. And this type of time use isn't "unproductive" if it leaves you feeling like you're being your true or best self.
5. Did you do anything today that will relieve an ongoing frustration or drain on your energy?
For example, if your computer had been running slow for the past week because it was low on space, you cleaned it out and installed systems that will keep it from slowing in the future.
6. Did you practice any habits that keep up your fitness or improve a key skill?
For me, for example, writing every day improves that skill and keeps up my writing "fitness." If I write something every day, then I avoid that sense of needing to "get back into it" if I've not done it for a while.
7. What did you do right?
If you naturally tend to focus on time you wasted or productivity frustrations, try asking yourself what you did right today from a productivity standpoint. This way you're not just endlessly criticizing yourself.
Wrapping Up
Feeling like you can never get through your to-do list is demoralizing. However, by asking yourself the above questions you can focus on what's most important and feel better about your productivity, even if you never get to the end of your list. You don't need to ask yourself all of these questions every day—doing so would probably be unproductive or inefficient—but try asking yourself each one at least occasionally. By varying the questions you ask yourself, you'll help avoid blind spots in how you judge your productivity.
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