Journaling & Reviewing System – Accelerating Learning Rate Through Effective Reflection (WIP)

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Notable Perspectives

“Of all the ways you could be spending your precious time and attention, it is very unlikely that you are currently spending it in the optimal way. The only path I know for figuring out a better way to spend your life is to sit and think. You simply have to carve out some time to think carefully about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and what you’re really trying to achieve. Nobody stumbles into a well lived life. It has to be cultivated. Reflection and review are critical.” – James Clear

Introduction

Are you wondering if you should have a review and journaling practice? If you have one, are you happy with the amount of time you’re currently spending on it? Do you feel like you receive sufficient benefit from it? How could you extract more insight from your experiences and mistakes? If such questions resonate with you, chances are you’ll like this article.

Many of us have kept a journal at one point or another, perhaps in childhood or teenagehood. It could have been a descriptive journal where we write down the events of the day or a stream-of-consciousness journal that helped us navigate through emotionally difficult times.

As usual, we’ll cover the conceptual landscape, the benefits and the system design. We’ll discover how we can establish or get more out of our reviewing and journaling system.

At the end of this article, I believe you will be in a much better position to accelerate your growth rate significantly.

Disambiguating Terminology

We’ve mentioned reviewing and journaling in many of the different articles as an important component to drive progress. Here, we systematically investigated it as a stand-alone topic.

Reviewing and reflecting are treated as synonyms. However, we will impose a distinction between reviewing and journaling. Nevertheless, the distinction has only mild practical relevance, as we’ll see later. Journaling is conceptualized as an activity that is primarily focused on self-expression, emotional processing, data collection, and shaping mental (or attentional) habits. In contrast, reviewing is conceptualized as an activity that is mostly concerned with analysis for the purpose of gaining actionable insights. In other words, when we journal, we create qualitative data that can later be reviewed and analyzed to extract important lessons.

Both of them can be seen as activities, processes, practices, or a system. We’ll frame them as two processes contained in the Journaling and Reviewing System (J&R System). It is important to discuss the distinction before we tie them together. However, the distinction becomes less relevant once they are merged together in a system.

Journaling

Journaling is a specific form of writing that has different functions, such as generating ideas or changing our attentional habits. As discussed in the article on the Tracking System, journaling can be considered part of it. However, it can also be beneficial to relate it to reviewing. As suggested in the PDS article, distinctions between the systems/components are blurry and what matters is to select a mental structure that works for you. When starting with the PDS, I would recommend conceptualizing journaling and reviewing together as a system.

What matters is to view journaling as a goal-directed tool designed to achieve a certain outcome or solve a specific problem. For example, if we’re trying to become a more grateful person, we might consider how to achieve this desired outcome. That is, we might consider what tools we have at our disposal that could help us become more grateful. “Journaling” is an excellent form/tool for that purpose. For example, if we establish a daily gratitude journal with the prompt “what am I grateful for today?”, we might significantly become more grateful over time.

We can distinguish between two forms of journaling:

• Prompted (or structured) journaling: writing facilitated by some sort of structure or one/more prompts, e.g., “what made you feel grateful today?” or “what was the most important thing you accomplished today and why?”
• Unprompted (or unstructured) journaling: writing that is freeform and intuitive and guided by whatever comes to mind as we write.

Both forms of journaling can serve similar and distinct functions: express yourself through writing, explore how you feel about a topic, and generate data for future reviews.

Reviewing

Just like with journaling, reviewing is a form/tool that serves specific functions. It can serve the same or different functions depending on the existence of a meaningful conceptual distinction or not. In order to design a beneficial review process, we need to be clear about its functions. Mindlessly reviewing old notes without a goal in mind achieves little. Done skillfully, reviewing enables you to learn more from your experiences than you otherwise would. Reviewing is a form designed to extract insights from our experiences.

Suppose that you’re trying to improve your social skills and that you’ve taken notes after each social event you’ve attended for the past couple of months. It’s crucial to review them at some point to discover insights and revisit your goals (or functions^[1]) for your social life. For example, let’s say that one goal is to make others feel more comfortable and at ease in your presence. You could then review your notes while scanning for anything relevant to this goal, such as “Gary seemed to get tense and awkward when I started giving him advice about his startup” or “Made a punch-up joke about billionaires while surrounded by a handful of people – and everyone laughed!” As you go through your notes with the goal in mind, you’ll probably start noticing patterns relevant to your goal, which can lead to valuable insight.

We can distinguish two types of reviewing:

• Data-based reviewing: deriving insight from data you’ve collected, e.g., tracking spreadsheets, project notes, and personal feedback from coworkers or friends. You analyze the data to gain insight into the goals or projects the reviewing is related to.
• Memory-based reviewing: deriving insight from memory-based retrieval of past experiences. Basically, this means consulting your memory about certain past experiences and trying to derive insight from those memories. While this form of reviewing is valuable if you don’t have much or any data or if you’re short on time, it suffers from obvious problems: our memory distorts and biases past experiences and may not accurately reflect them, so there’s some loss of information at least and some risk of drawing incorrect conclusions from your memory.

The system recommended in this article will include a data-based approach to reviewing. This appears to be the most helpful type of reviewing for most of our audience.

As long as your system includes the functions of both reviewing and journaling, it doesn’t really matter whether you call it a “journaling system”, a “reviewing system”, or something else. Being able to think about these concepts separately can be useful in setting up your reflection system, though, because the two concepts will activate somewhat different ideas and associations in your mind.

The Benefits of an R&J System

Journaling: Acquiring empowering mental habits

Let’s consider why it may be valuable to have a J&R system in your life. As we’ve done in other articles, it’s often helpful to approach this question by considering what is lacking without a J&R system. In other words, how is someone worse off by not having such a practice or system in their life?

For clarity and simplicity, we’ll compare archetypal examples of someone without any J&R practice to someone with a highly consistent practice, although the reality is that many people will be somewhere in between those two extremes and have an irregular or infrequent J&R practice.

The main benefit is that it helps you move from undesirable mental and attention habits to beneficial ones. For example, this could mean replacing a proclivity to ruminate about events outside of your control to focus on things within your sphere of control. Or it could mean reducing unhealthy comparisons and promoting a team mindset.

We can divide undesirable or suboptimal mental habits into three categories: culturally inherited mental habits, evolutionary mental habits and causal conditioning.

Socially-adapted mental habits

Most people have acquired suboptimal mental habits from their parents, friends and broader culture – There are many such harmful habits. As an example, if we were raised in a household where money was used as a signal of caring and affection (e.g., your dad trying to resolve conflicts with your mom by buying her gifts instead of talking with her), we may have inherited such a tendency through no fault of our own. This might be in first place driven by the widely promoted consumer culture.

No matter what culture we were raised in, we almost certainly have some harmful mental habits that we’d rather not have if we could magically do away with them and replace them with other mental habits. That is, on reflection, the mental habits we’d ideally want would almost certainly look different than the ones we actually have.

To change mental habits, you need deliberate and consistent practice – Mental habits tend to be deeply ingrained in how we think about ourselves and the world, and, as with habits in general, they don’t tend to change without effort. It could be achieved by other means than journaling or reviewing; the mechanism is probably something like “reflecting on your mental habits,” which can be facilitated by different means, whether it’s positive affirmations, journaling or reflective walks in nature.

Evolutionary mental habits

Moving on to evolutionary mental habits, these refer to habits that we have evolved to have as a species. One example would be negativity bias [source], which may lead us to be much more critical and judging of ourselves and others than we’d like, on reflection. This could mean negative self-talk or being overly critical of mistakes made by a coworker. If the intention is to help ourselves or others improve at something, then we need to avoid being overly critical and judgmental.

Cultivating a more balanced perspective via reflection (e.g., journaling) may help us mitigate negativity bias and more effectively meet the goal of helping ourselves or others improve. Basically, negativity bias needs to be counteracted with a positive disposition that you deliberately practice because seeing mistakes, flaws and so on is how we’re wired biologically. Gratitude is one way to counteract this natural negative tendency. For example, we could journal about qualities that we like about our partner or in ourselves.

Causal conditioning

Finally, there’s a third category of harmful mental habits that we may consider a mix of evolutionary and culturally inherited – we’ll refer to these as causal conditioning because they concern how we become conditioned to misattribute the causes of people’s apparent success or well-being.

One obvious example is consumerism: the tendency to judge people’s worth (including our own) based on the material possessions acquired. Of course, material possessions can be valuable and make life more comfortable; but we probably wouldn’t want to judge a person’s worth based on their possessions, on reflection. But those of us who have been raised in Western societies often find it natural to associate things we intrinsically value with consumer goods, for example, “if I drink this coke, I’ll become as energetic and fit as the hot person in this commercial” or “if I get this car, I will feel free from constraints and happy”. It takes work to overcome such mental habits and replace them with others that are aligned with our values.

Even if we don’t routinely reflect or journal, we may occasionally have moments of clarity where it becomes obvious to us how we’d like our mind to be. But that’s not to be counted on as a way of cultivating new and desirable mental habits. Instead, what’s needed is regular practice, ideally on a daily basis. Modern media tends to make us focus on what we lack as opposed to what we have and feel grateful for. If we take some time to practice gratitude every day, we can expect to naturally start to feel more grateful (and less preoccupied with what’s missing in our lives). There are many ways to practice gratitude. One prompt might be, “how is my life better than the lives of almost everyone who lived 100 years ago?” One helpful tip is to practice feeling grateful for good things that happen to others, because that vastly increases the space of possible things to feel grateful for (because only a tiny fraction of good things that happen to people happen to you in particular).

We may be skeptical about the idea of taking time every day (or most days) to deliberately cultivate new mental habits such as gratitude. After all, we only have so many hours in the day, and ten minutes spent practicing gratitude could have been spent doing anything else. This is a very understandable reaction! However, it should be emphasized that mental habits that have formed early in life often take years of regular practice to overcome and replace with new habits. There are many years of mental programming to undo. While this is unfortunate, the good news is that it is possible, and I’d encourage you to consider if ten minutes per day (or similar) over the course of a few years seems like a good investment to you, if the result would be that you become a significantly happier person with an outlook on life that is much more value-aligned.

So, the main value proposition of a regular journaling habit is that it’s an extremely useful tool for undoing years of mental programming that doesn’t serve us well (anymore). Regular R&P System can help us program our mind the way we’d like it to be programmed.

Reviewing: gain more insight from your experiences

We’ve discussed the value proposition for journaling. Let’s move on to reviewing, and consider why this can improve your life.

Consequences of not having an R&J system

It’s helpful to first take a step back and think about what the brain does with our daily experiences without a journaling and reviewing practice. Without it, we’ll be relying on our brain to identify patterns in our lives and draw conclusions, for example, about what makes us happy or what we like to do for work. The problem is that the brain is not that reliable in this regard unless we feed it some data. Without data (generated by a journaling and tracking practice), we’re relying on biases, self-image and such to come to conclusions about important things about ourselves and how to navigate the world.

We can build up a much more accurate picture of the patterns in our lives, such as what influences our well-being or what kinds of work we’re good at, by collecting data and reviewing that data at regular intervals. It’ll be easier to avoid making decisions based on cultural myths and biased memories. A lot of valuable information will be lost by simply relying on our memory and intuition when pondering such questions. By combining our aptitude for reflection with the data we’ve collected, we can gain a lot more insight per minute we spend thinking about such important questions! That’s why reviewing can be such a valuable tool.

Extend your memory and spot patterns

Additionally, collecting data for regular reviews, also makes it easier to implement feedback we may have received from other people whose judgment we trust. For example, feedback from friends about what makes us a good friend or feedback from coworkers about our biggest strengths at work. Such feedback is also much more likely to get lost without a (review) system in which we can somehow capture it and reflect on it later.

This is not just about remembering each piece of feedback we receive. It’s also about capturing enough information to be able to identify patterns in the feedback we receive – If we’ve collected and we see a pattern forming, it’s easier to update based on negative information (e.g., about weaknesses we may have) than if we’re relying exclusively on our memory. In the latter case, we’re probably just going to think of isolated pieces of feedback one at a time, which is much more tempting to discard and forget about. However, if we have enough data to have a pattern jumping out at us, it’s much more likely we’ll actually take it into account and learn from it, even if it’s unpleasant.

Journaling and reviewing can help you extract insight from your experiences at different levels of abstraction – Let’s consider goal achievement as an example. Imagine that you regularly set goals for yourself but that you never review the goals you set or your approach to goal-setting. You’d find it difficult to become better at setting and meeting your goals. You may waste a lot of effort and experience a lot of frustration setting unrealistic goals for yourself and, over time, become discouraged with goal-setting. Contrast this with a review practice where you regularly review both the goals themselves as well as your goal-setting approach or system. You could learn much more about how you’re doing with regard to the goals themselves and if your process or system for goal-setting is working for you. This hopefully helps illuminate how much additional information you can extract from your experience by having a review practice: not only can it inform how you do things on an object-level. It can also help you figure out how to do things on a meta-level. For example, it can help you meet more of your goals both by learning more about how your goals are working for you as well as how your goal-setting process or system is working for you.

Let’s continue with the example of goal-setting. Now, imagine that you do have some minimal review practice here. For example, let’s say that when you meet a goal or fail to do so, you simply check in with yourself at the goal deadline and ask yourself if you meet the goal or not. When you’ve done that, you move on. While this is better than not even evaluating whether you meet your goals or not, hopefully it’s apparent that you’d still lose out on a lot of valuable information by just having one yes/no question as your entire goal review practice.

Use qualitative review prompts to extract insight

This brings us to the question of how elaborate your J&R system should be. Certainly, there are ways of overdoing this and getting unhelpfully perfectionist about your J&R system, where you keep reflecting way past the points of diminishing returns. However, the reverse is probably much more common: having a minimal review practice that stops before you’ve exhausted all the valuable insights you could have had by doing more reflection.

Continuing with the yes/no goal-setting review example, this could be expanded by adding questions such as “why didn’t I achieve this goal?” or “how did I manage to achieve this goal”? Adding such qualitative questions to the review can help generate a lot of insight. For example, perhaps you’d discover that if you think to yourself that you’re just going to watch one episode of some new TV show you’re curious about, then it tends to end with you watching the entire show at the expense of other more meaningful things you would have liked to do in your leisure time instead. Insights like these are much harder to have and learn from without a review practice. Without it, we’re more likely to be self-delusional about how we’re likely to actually behave in certain situations. And a prompt such as “why didn’t I achieve this goal?” is a concrete example of the sorts of questions that can make up a review you practice by which you can have that kind of insight and learn from it.

Realism, sense-making, silver linings and authentic goals

Having informative J&R practice will help build up a more realistic picture of what you can achieve on certain timescales – say, in a week, month or year. You’ll gain feedback from your experience to help you learn from mistakes, so you can avoid doing the same things again and again that aren’t working for you, whether it’s unrealistic goals, unspecific goals or something else.

J&R can change how you ascribe meaning to things and make sense of your experiences – This also applies to daily J&R practice. For example, imagine that you had one of those days where nothing seems to work out and things don’t go according to plan. At the end of the day, you feel self-critical and bad about yourself, and you blame yourself for not accomplishing enough. This is where self-defeating narratives can do a lot of damage to people. And such narratives can stay deeply entrenched in how we view ourselves without a reflection practice like daily journaling or something similar. With a daily journaling practice, you might realize that a lot of factors outside of your control contributed to this day going haywire and that you actually did a lot of things within your control to make the most of the day. You might also realize that you’ve actually had a lot of great days recently where you’ve felt very productive and happy. Thus, you feel much better about yourself and the events of the day even though the only thing that changed is how you think about what happened, not what actually happened. Imagine doing something like this every day – that stuff really adds up over time and can lead to very deep and meaningful shifts in your self-image if you keep it up.

Identify silver linings in difficult life experiences – Perhaps you have had some traumatic experiences in your childhood that have created a lot of difficult situations for you in adulthood as well. If you’ve never thought about how this may have benefited you in certain ways, it’s likely you’ll think that there simply is no benefit to be found. This is certainly not meant to belittle the impact of trauma; traumatic experiences can be devastating and leave wounds that won’t ever fully heal. Even so, in addition to doing what you can to manage the impact of your trauma, you may also want to consider how it’s actually helped you in certain ways (despite all the suffering it has caused). For example, maybe the suffering has made you a more sensitive and empathetic person, and maybe that is very beneficial for your relationships. This is an example of how journaling can help via meaning-making: finding new meaning in difficult experiences.

J&R may help you be more cautious about applying other people’s experiences to your own or automatically adopt the goals of others – For example, if you come across some marketing for a course that claims that they’ll teach you how to become a millionaire in one year. If you have a regular J&R practice and have a fairly accurate sense of what you can accomplish in a year, you may immediately be more suspicious of such things. For example, you may realize that even if the author of the course managed to pull this off, it would probably have because they did certain things in the past to enable this, which probably won’t be apparent from the course they’re selling.

Another example: suppose that your friend has just finished setting goals for the year, and she shows you a list of everything she intends to accomplish. Let’s say that your friend is, for various reasons, much more productive than you. Without the wisdom and insight to be had from J&R practice, you might be at risk of automatically adopting an equally ambitious list of goals for yourself, which would mean setting yourself up to fail! This would be bad, as it would be frustrating and risk making you feel discouraged about goal-setting in general.

How to Build Your J&R System

As usual, I recommend being pragmatic and starting small when setting up the J&R system. It’s very tempting to try to take everything on at once because we can stay in the fantasy of doing a big life upgrade all at once, which is a very alluring thought. But this almost always fails and can be very discouraging.

In the following, I’ll walk you through the steps to create a J&R system. If you already have a goal-setting or planning system in place, you may want to create your J&R practice in a way that fits into those existing systems. You might then want to do J&R, planning and goal-setting, respectively, in one sitting during time blocks allocated for this purpose.

While you may want to keep the theoretical distinction in mind, we’ll tend to use “journaling” and “reviewing” interchangeably for the remainder of this article. That’s because our recommended approach to setting up a J&R system will include both activities and it won’t add clarity to clearly distinguish them for practical purposes

Specify functions

As usual, we need to define two types of functions for our J&R system:

• System level functions
  • Timescale-agnostic functions: These apply to all R&J types regardless of their timescale.
  • Timescale-specific functions: These pertain to specific R&J types, e.g., weekly or monthly R&J practice.
• Object-level functions: These are the reasons you are journaling and reviewing at all.

The benefit section pointed towards different system-level functions. Using the system-level syntax, the J&R system should ensure that we

• execute our system consistently
• derive value continuously
• adapt it to the changing external environment and our individual psychology
• learn from life experiences and data effectively (e.g., mistakes, successes, challenges, failed goals)
• collect qualitative data delibertely
• replace undesirable mental and attention habits with beneficial ones
• cultivate an empowering self-image and mental habits like gratitude
• understand what we realistically achieve within certain timescales
• monitor suboptimal external influence (e.g., marketing)

This is a selection of timescale-agnostic functions that would be beneficial no matter what your object-level functions are.

Timescale-specific functions are functions that are more relevant for a specific timescale. For example, one weekly J&R function might be to “prevent the formation of negative habits”. This function specifically pertains to shorter timescales (such as daily or weekly) because it is critical to stop the formation of negative habits early. We need a frequent monitoring and correction mechanism. In contrast, the same function will yield less benefit on an annual timescale.

The object-level functions mirror our current professional and personal goals. For example, you might have the goal (or function of your PDS) of becoming a more virtuous and noble individual. Using your character, goal-setting and planning systems, you’ve decided that the most important character virtue for you to cultivate right now is courage. If so, an object-level function would be to “design my J&R templates on all timescales such that they help me become more courageous.”

Select timescales

We need to decide the timescales for our J&R practice. The most common options are:

• Daily (beginner-friendly)
• Weekly (beginner-friendly)
• Monthly (advanced)
• Quarterly (advanced)
• Annually (beginner-friendly)

You may want to think of monthly and quarterly as more advanced options, and you probably don’t want to include these time horizons if you’re new to J&R or have struggled to make a regular practice of this so far. This is not because there’s anything inherently difficult about J&R practice on these timescales compared to the others. It’s because having J&R practice on too many timescales, in the beginning, may feel overwhelming and unlikely to stick over time. And it usually isn’t ideal to only do monthly and/or quarterly J&R practice.

So, many people may want to start by establishing a daily, weekly and annual J&R practice. That said, the decision of which timescales to pick will depend not only on your experience with J&R but also on other factors, such as how complex your life is.

Cover all functions with prompts cost-effectively

The R&J system usually has more than one function. Consequently, you need to limit the number of prompts per function to ensure consistent execution. Two to three prompts per function are often reasonable. Suppose that two of your high-level functions are:

• Become more courageous
• Write and self-publish a novel

In that case, you might want to add two to three prompts per function, such as “how could’ve dared more greatly today?” and “what was the most enjoyable aspect of writing today?”

Align prompts with functions

Use question prompts – A prompt could be either a question, a statement or a heading. For example, if one object-level function is to increase our sense of self-efficacy, then the prompt could either be “what successes do I want to celebrate from the past week?” or “celebrate successes from the past week”. The question format appears generally more useful for people, so if in doubt, we suggest going ahead with that.

Going back to the courage example, let’s consider what some valuable J&R prompts might be if cultivating courage is one of your goals. You might end up with the following goal-aligned questions:

• “Where did I miss opportunities to practice courage today?”
• “Where did I practice courage today?”
• “What would I have missed if I hadn’t acted courageously?”
• “Did I see someone being courageous today? What can I learn from that?”

These questions all somehow move you towards your goal of growing more courageous as a person.

Explicate prompt functions – One function of prompts, such as “where did I miss opportunities to practice courage today?”, is to strengthen the awareness of opportunities to practice something. Moreover, it can help with noticing patterns of systematic neglect in opportunities to act courageously. Initially, you have difficulty noticing one opportunity, but, as you practice, you might be able to easily notice at least three opportunities per day effortlessly.

Another function of prompts is positive and negative reinforcement related to a specific practice or virtue. For example, prompts can help you reflect on the positive consequences of acting courageously and the negative consequences of not acting courageously. This can be achieved with prompts like “What would I have missed if I hadn’t acted courageously?” or “How did I feel after acting courageously?” For example, suppose you spot an attractive stranger at a party that you’d like to talk to. The prompt might then help you realize that if you hadn’t started an interaction despite feeling some discomfort, you would have missed out on a great interaction and a date with someone you might be into! It helps you see the value in tolerating discomfort and not letting it prevent you from acting to get what you want. That way, you’ll also be positively reinforcing courageous action by considering what you would have missed by not acting courageously.

You can also have prompts that serve more than one function, like “Did I see someone being courageous today? What can I learn from that?” It helps you become aware of more opportunities, consequences, and levels of courageous acts.

Prioritize empowering prompts

When you craft prompts, it’s important to pay attention to how they make you feel.

Encourage consequences, not merely descriptions – It’s worth spending effort on properly wording your prompts, so they intellectually and emotionally resonate. Often people write prompts that trigger descriptive statements instead of encouraging a mix of descriptive and impact statements. For example, consider the prompt, “when did I act courageously in the last week?”. This is good because it draws your attention to successful acts of courage. But it will likely lead to listing things without probing their significance. In contrast, consider this prompt: “how did last week’s acts of courage contribute to a more benevolent/wholesome world?” Your response will usually include the act and a juicy consequence, which leads to stronger positive reinforcement. Ensure that your prompts trigger statements probe the relevance of something you list.

Use more approach than avoidance prompts – In the goal-setting and planning article, I discussed the distinction between approach goals (or prompts) and avoidance goals (or prompts): the former means framing goals in terms of what you’d like to achieve (e.g., feel calmer), whereas the latter means framing goals in terms of what you’d like to avoid or prevent (e.g., feel less anxious).

Approach goals tend to facilitate positive change more effectively. Continuing with the example of anxiety/calmness, using the avoidance goal framing is likely to have the consequence that you’ll start paying more attention to anxiety in your life. Instead, the approach framing will probably help draw your attention to calmness and what helps facilitate it. On both of these goal formulations, the desired outcome is the same, but the approach goal formulation will likely be more motivating and sustainable. Think about it: if you ask yourself right now, “how can I feel less anxious this week?”, what does your mind do? It’s probably drawn to unpleasant situations that you associate with anxiety! On the contrary, what happens if you ask yourself, “how can I feel calmer this week?” Now, your mind is probably drawn to pleasant moments where you’ve felt good about yourself! Which of these two lines of thought would you rather cultivate and engage with?

Having said that, you may want to be open to avoidance framings when you do your initial brainstorming. For example, it’s fine to start out with “feel less anxious on a weekly basis” on your initial list of brainstormed options. But when you implement it, you’ll probably want to change the wording and turn it into an approach goal, such as “feel calmer on a weekly basis”. Then, as you go through the week, you’ll be more likely to pay attention to events throughout the day that make you feel calmer, and you may naturally wonder what may have caused it. You direct your attention to the qualities you want to cultivate rather than what you’d like to avoid.

Constructive prompts should follow the OIR feedback – We discussed the Observation-Impact-Recommendation (OIR) framework for feedback in the character development article. You can use prompts designed based on this framework to provide yourself with high-quality feedback. There’s a risk of accidentally ending up reinforcing negativity bias if our prompts are not handled with care. Generally, your J&R practice should ensure the feedback ratio is at least 2:1 (positive to constructive). Unlocking constructive prompts can help you notice and capture opportunities for excellence across many domains.

As an example, pay attention to how the following prompts make you feel:

• What mistakes did I make today?
• What needs work today?
• What could’ve done better today?
• Where could’ve been more awesome today?

Individuals will have different emotional and intellectual reactions to the prompts. What matters is that you follow the OIR framework. For example, I observed that I could’ve been more awesome today if I didn’t send an important email with typos. It makes other people think less of me. I recommend myself to track re-reading and typos in emails for the next two weeks, and if I don’t re-read an email or spot typos, I have to pay 10$ to Max.

Notice impactful answer syntaxes

As you experiment with different prompts, you might encounter particular useful ways to answer a prompt. Ensure that you capture these observations in a journal.

For example, I wanted to use the concept of decisions more in my J&R practice. So I crafted the prompt, “what good decision did I make today?” After responding in different ways, I discovered that the most powerful syntax was:

I decided to [option A/verb] instead of [option B/verb], which will lead/led to Z [outcome].

This is an impactful prompt because it encourages contrasting our decision with the counterfactual decision and explicating the (potential) consequence of the decision. For example: “Today I decided to apologise to my partner for my part in our fight last night instead of staying quiet and hoping for change, which led to a harmonizing conversation and a greater sense of confidence in our conflict resolution abilities.”

This makes it crystal clear how it was valuable (for this person and their partner) to take the difficult action, even though it required tolerating some discomfort. It also reveals how this was better than taking the tempting, easy action of not making contact or being unavailable.

Over time, this prompt may help us recognize when we’re in situations where we face an important character moment; “oh, this is one of those moments where, if I do what feels difficult right now, I’ll look back on it tomorrow and feel really happy I did”.

Create your prompts shortlist

Develop your MVP with the TOP 3 prompts – If you’re new to this kind of J&R practice, you may want to limit yourself to three prompts in total, with one question for one object-level function. So, if you were to have only one or two object-level functions, then one object-level function could have more than one question associated with it. Let’s call these three prompts your “TOP 3”^[2]. Aim to use your TOP 3 as the MVP of your J&R system until you feel confident in the J&R habit. Now, we can consider adding more prompts.

If you’re already experienced with J&R and feel ready to push things to the next level, you may want to come up with a TOP 5 or even a TOP 10 list of prompts for J&R practice. Again, adhere to a ratio of either 2:1 or 3:1 in favor of positive prompts, by which I mean an approach-oriented question. In this case, we can think of negative prompts as including both avoidance prompts and constructive prompts (as we previously defined them). If you have an unfavourable self-image, you may want to go with the 3:1 ratio, as you need to do more heavy lifting to cultivate a positive perspective. So, if you start out with your TOP 3, you’d then have two positive prompts and one constructive prompt.

Another way to create this positive ratio is to generate longer answers for the positive review prompts than the negative review prompts. That way, you wouldn’t need to have a positive balance of 2:1 or 3:1 in the questions themselves. Instead, the positive ratio would appear in the length of the answers generated for the respective prompts.

Either way, the important takeaway is to spend most of your review efforts on actively cultivating positive mental habits.

Notice unfavourable effects

Some positive prompts can carry a risk of ego inflation. You might start with prompts, such as “what am I proud of?” or “what were my biggest successes last month?”. Over time, you may want to move away from prompts that are about your personal accomplishments and instead move towards prompts that are about creating value or celebrating life but not about you as a person. For example, prompts like “what were my biggest contributions to the greater good last month?”, “what makes life worth celebrating” or “besides me, who else deserves credit for the success of this project?” There may be some risk of harmful ego inflation if you take it too far with self-aggrandizing prompts. Especially if you’d be engaging with such prompts every day. If so, the prompts may substantially influence the way you see the world; subtle benefits or harms will accrue slowly and in a way you won’t be able to detect from one day to the next. However, this word of caution doesn’t apply to you if you’re struggling with low self-worth and are just starting out with trying to shift your internal narrative in a more positive direction!

Pre-mortems: improve your system before you start using it

Imagine that your R&J system has failed, why? This is a classical pre-mortem prompt. When building systems, it is important to identify weak points in the system and plans. These identified weak points should be used to develop fixes and improvements before you start using a system or executing a plan.

For example, the pre-mortem makes you realize that you need to pick a certain weekly time slot where you plan to do your weekly J&R. Without this, you expect low success. You decide to do your J&R on Sunday at noon. To continue bullet-proofing your plan, you do another pre-mortem and ask yourself why or how that plan failed (i.e., why you didn’t manage to do the review on Sunday at noon). Consequently, you might realize that Sunday is a day when you enjoy engaging in spontaneous activities, which would make R&J consistently difficult. You can keep doing pre-mortems until you feel confident that things (usually) won’t get in the way.

Choose the J&R infrastructure

Decide which tool you’re going to use for your J&R practice – Before thinking about specific tools (e.g., software), you should consider what modality you want. For example, do you want to capture speech, video or writing? In deciding, you’ll want to think about what you want to do with the data and go back to your review functions.

Digital tools make data analysis easier – You may want to do some functional analysis to ensure a good match between the tool chosen and your review goals. For example, suppose you’re thinking about doing your J&R practice in a physical journal. One major disadvantage is that this data is really hard to analyze. If you want to be able to see broader trends, it’ll be difficult with this format. A digital format is vastly superior with regard to analysis: it’s much easier to review past entries and search for patterns. That doesn’t mean you can’t use a physical journal for this or other purposes. I’m just trying to draw attention to the disadvantages of doing so. There are strengths and advantages to both of these media. You could have both physical and digital journaling tools, perhaps serving different yet related purposes. Maybe you want a whiteboard on your wall for quickly jotting down ideas. Or maybe you want a journal that fits in your pocket so you can easily carry it around with you. Or perhaps you want a journaling tool with an analogue interface so you get the tactile benefits of a physical journaling while also translating your notes into software. Consider how much time you can realistically spend on journaling, though, before you get carried away with finding the optimal medium or media. If it’s just ten minutes at the end of the day, there won’t be much time for processing your notes or getting them into a database.

There are many different digital note-taking tools out there. One feature that you’ll find in some tools is tagging. Tagging is useful for analysis and for spotting patterns. For example, if you have a “gratitude” tag, you could search your database for all entries with this tag, enabling you to identify patterns with regard to gratitude. One versatile tool that some people really like is Roam Research. However, it’s not free to use, and you may be able to find other tools – such as Notion – that are just as good for your purposes and can be used for free.

Don’t overthink this – It’s really important to not get too perfectionistic at this stage. Basically, pick an approach and a tool and get down to business. Don’t worry too much about finding the optimal tool when you’re just getting started. You’ll review and update your system later.

Keep it fresh: monitor, evaluate and update your system

It’s important that you find it easy to interact with your system; otherwise, you won’t feel like doing it – Try to make sure it’s grounded in what resonates intuitively and what “feels alive”. It’s important to take your gut into account when setting up these things!

We already touched on the importance of limiting yourself to just a few prompts in the beginning, for example, selecting your TOP 3. This is one way of keeping your system manageable.

As you make progress, your high-level review goals will change. When this happens, you’ll probably want to make corresponding changes to your review prompts. For example, you may find that you’ve developed enough courage that this is no longer a bottleneck and you may want to move on to something else, such as growing your wealth. Such a goal change should probably be reflected in your review prompts.

Many things could prompt you to revise or update your J&R system. Maybe you’re working with a coach who has helped you achieve greater clarity about what your biggest bottlenecks are, and perhaps you’ll want to update your high-level goals and prompts accordingly. Or perhaps you have found that your sleep issues are so important to fix that you want to have a dedicated sleep journal specifically for facilitating reflection about sleep hygiene.

Your J&R system should include regular system-wide reviews and updates (e.g., PDS-level and component levels like Tracking System or G&P System).

When your J&R system isn’t working well

If you find yourself slipping out of the habit of regularly doing your J&R practice, don’t beat yourself up. Assume that there’s a valid reason and allow yourself to explore what it’s about. You might learn something important about yourself or about why your current system isn’t working.

Explore with self-compassion

One unhealthy way of responding to “system failure” is self-blame. Another harmful response is to blame the practice itself as opposed to your particular approach to it. It’s safe to assume that it’s almost certainly your approach to it that isn’t working for reasons that are worth exploring.

It’s usually for one of two reasons:

• Insufficient consistency
• Insufficient value

For one, it could be that the lack of consistency is the reason you’re not motivated to do your J&R practice – The value of the practice tends to go up with consistency because greater consistency leads to more worthwhile results. So if you’re not doing it that often, it could be that you simply haven’t done your J&R frequently enough to discover its value.

It could also be that the problem really is about the practice not containing enough value (even if done consistently) – perhaps your J&R system isn’t sufficiently valuable that you’re motivated to keep it up or do it consistently. This doesn’t mean that J&R isn’t worth it. It just means that your current setup somehow isn’t working for you. Maybe the prompts need editing. Or maybe your goals have shifted since you set it up, such that your system is now based on outdated goals that no longer feel resonant.

Of course, it’s also possible that the issue is a combination of low value and lack of consistency.

If, for whatever reason, you struggle to stay motivated to do your J&R practice, one way to address this is to schedule regular reviews of the system itself (i.e., a meta-review of sorts), for example, once per quarter.

Let’s unpack how you might be able to diagnose whether the problem is insufficient value or insufficient levels of consistency (or both).

Insufficient consistency

If you have been very consistent with your J&R practice until you go on vacation for a week, then return from vacation and find yourself not doing your J&R practice anymore, then that would be a sign that lack of consistency is the issue.

If low value was the issue, how come you managed to do it consistently until you went on vacation? It probably didn’t stop being valuable just because you went away for a week! However, it certainly is possible that by being away from your everyday life for a while, you gain a new perspective on things and think of better ways of addressing life’s challenges. So, while this is a helpful heuristic for diagnosing the cause of not regularly using your system, it will sometimes make you draw the wrong conclusions if used uncritically, so it’s important to also think for yourself. Tracking can often help address the consistency issue^[3].

Insufficient value

What might indicate that insufficient value is the issue? If you’ve been doing your J&R consistently but notice that you really don’t like doing it and it feels like a really boring or frustrating chore. That would be a sign that the practice, in its current implementation, is not sufficiently valuable to you.

It’s important to appreciate that it can be very valuable while still not being fun or still not being the thing you most feel like doing in the moment. As with brushing your teeth or doing your taxes, there are things you (happily) do for the sake of your future self even though it’s not that fun or even boring.

So it may take some careful introspection to distinguish the two from one another: does the dislike of the task mean that the practice isn’t valuable enough, or is it that you have unreasonable expectations about how fun or interesting it should feel to cultivate desired mental habits and character traits?

To address the value issue, it can help to monitor the value you get from your J&R practice by tracking how valuable you found your J&R practice, e.g., on a scale from 1-5. You could have a check in place where a value of 3/5 or lower (multiple times in a row) means you have to reflect on whether your system is losing value and what needs changing.

Mindset: manage expectations, make it fun and trust in your process

Trust in the process – We mentioned brushing your teeth as an example of something you probably just do and find it worth doing even though you could be doing more fun or interesting things during that time. Doing J&R for the purpose of shifting your behavior and cultivating desired mental habits is just like that. In some sense, you have to trust in the process. Trust that you’re doing this for reasons that you have carefully reflected on, and remind yourself that it’s okay to spend your time this way. It’s OK to spend time brushing your teeth, doing physical exercise and doing the dishes. It’s also OK to spend time on your reviewing and journaling practice.

The process mindset can be helpful to activate when you’re trying to build habits and feel like you’re failing. It’s like practicing mindfulness meditation: when your mind wanders off, you may feel like you’re not making progress. Trust that you are making progress and that mind-wandering is to be expected of anyone who practices mindfulness meditation. Bring your attention back and keep practicing. You can expect it to get easier with practice.

Variation can keep things interesting – When you start practicing gratitude, it will almost certainly be a lot harder to think of things you’re grateful for than if you’ve been asking yourself that question every day for a year. This is an important point to appreciate for the purposes of managing your expectations. And if the practice of regularly writing down gratitude items starts to feel boring, you may want to switch it up. For example, try mentally going through things you’re grateful for with closed eyes or saying out loud what you’re grateful for while paying attention to how it makes you feel and where in the body you feel the gratitude.

Consult your different “parts” and find a reasonable consensus between them – Another thing that can help with motivation is to use a parts or subpersonalities perspective, such as Internal Family Systems. Taking this approach, you’d be asking yourself what different parts of you want. One purpose of doing this might be to help you understand why you might feel pulled in different directions. Maybe one part really wants you to do your journaling, but another part would much rather play a video game. You can use this approach to let multiple parts “have their say,” which helps some people find a reasonable consensus that takes the needs of different parts into account.

Make it more fun to use your system – For example, add a silly photo that cracks you up every time you open your system. Or an inspiring photo to remind you of the mental habits you’re trying to grow and nurture. Some people may want to have a checklist or similar that they go over right before they set up a new system or similar. A list to make sure that the system will contain important design and user features that you, from experience, know are important for making you stick with it over time.

In addition to making it more fun, you can also find ways to make it easier and simpler to engage with your system if motivation to keep up with your practice is flagging. For example, remove some prompts and limit yourself to five or ten minutes only and make the goal about wanting to do your J&R practice rather than extracting insight from doing the J&R. If you stop your J&R practice altogether you won’t get any value from it. So if your motivation is sufficiently low that you’re at risk of this (and it’s not a conscious choice you’re making), then your goal should instead be to make it more appealing to do the J&R practice. Then, when you have found a way to make it feel more motivating, you can again focus on learning from the J&R practice.

Micro-actions and other tips

We talked about how J&R are really just means of creating mental space for reflection and mental habit cultivation. There might be other means of achieving those goals that work better for you or that you perhaps want to do in conjunction with journaling and reviewing. For example, if you notice that you really like reflective walks where you leave your headphones at home and pick a question or topic to ponder as you walk around outdoors, then maybe that works for you and serves the same functions as more conventional reviewing or journaling would^[4].

How much time should you spend on J&R? Something like 10-30 minutes a day might work well for most people if we’re talking daily J&R. If you also do tracking on top of that, you may need to extend it to 30-60 minutes per day. But it’s hard to give heuristics here, and the optimal time allocation will vary a lot depending on the person and their life circumstances.

As for weekly J&R, many people may find it helpful to allocate about 2 hours per week. This would probably not include doing weekly tracking but might include reviewing tracking (and other) data, as well as making plans for next week.

If you also do monthly J&R, you may want to (mostly) skip weekly J&R during the weeks where your monthly review is due and spend 2-3 hours on the monthly review, but probably still include a review of the weekly goals from last week. You could also do brief versions of both monthly and weekly J&R during weeks when the two review schedules overlap.

When it comes to annual J&R, you may want to spend just a couple of days a week or even more, depending on how deep you want to go. All of those could make sense depending on your situation. After all, there’s probably going to be a lot of data to go over, and it’s likely the only time of the year when you’ll take this big-picture perspective.

Conclusion

This article has covered the J&R System. It is a meta-tool that can help us gain more insight from our experiences. It can help us with respect to the content covered in our other articles. Reviewing is about analysis and evaluation, whereas journaling is about self-exploration. The distinction between the two concepts is mostly theoretical and not that useful for practical purposes. We can review based on data we’ve collected or from memory, and the former is usually much better. Reviewing and journaling can either be free-form or prompt-based. Prompt-based J&R can be done either with statements or questions, and questions usually work best.

Without a J&R system, we’ll lose out on a lot of valuable insights that we could have had by reflecting on our experiences as we go through life. The brain is not well-equipped for automatically learning from experience. J&R helps us notice patterns we otherwise might not pick up on. There is both cultural and evolutionary programming to overcome via J&R.

I propose the following process for setting up a J&R system:

• Pick your time horizons
• Identify the functions of your J&R practices
• Brainstorm goal-based prompts
• Rewrite your prompts to make sure they’re appealing
  • Try the recommended syntax
• Narrow down your prompts to just 3, 5, or 10 prompts (usually, just three).
• Use pre-mortems to spot weaknesses in your J&R system before implementing it, so you can make your system better before you start using it
• Pick your J&R tools. (Don’t overthink this.)
• Regularly monitor, evaluate and revise your J&R system to keep it fresh