I'm sure everyone does some kind of reflections in their lives.
Often times after you made a mistake.
Or you've made a bad business decisions that costs thousands of dollars.
Or after you showed some bad behaviour in a family gathering, you've embarrassed your spouse and kids.
It can be as simple as you forgot to wash your running shorts, you skipped today's run.
And every time this happens, you promise to be better and will never repeat the same mistakes again. But it happened, again.
Maybe not the same but similar. Just different events and circumstances.
I'm guilty of making these mistakes.
As a solo founder and entrepreneur, I have no one to help but myself. So my next big task to do is putting all these reflections into action by having actionable tasks or goals.
As I mentioned before, I've scheduled a reflection day. Mostly on a Friday. In agile/scrum environment, they called it “Retro Friday”. It's a day to review what has happened during the weekdays and list out improvement plans for the week after.
It's similar here, but how I'd do it is by having all the sections of my life, work and other stuff, and go through them one by one.
For life section, it can be to maintain habits like having a daily workout, 100-word writing habit and so on. Since everyone is working from home right now, it can be something like managing a good work environment for my spouse and I, and also for my daughter's online classes and homework.
For work section, apart from the normal business strategy planning, it can be from something like improving my daily social media usage to planning #buildinpublic and #writinginpublic activities. Then analyze what has worked and not as planned and work on new plans.
Basically, instead leaving all the reflections in our head which vanishes as soon as we got distracted, we write them down on Notion or Trello or any other note-taking tools and start working on improvements.
Weekly Retro — Normally on Fridays, I have all my projects with dedicated Notion pages. Every week, I'll review and put updates + date. This is only for my own personal used to plan my week ahead.
Monthly Retro — Example. I started to share this in public for June 2021.