A weekly newsletter where I help people apply values-based productivity principles and systems for personal growth, primarily using Obsidian. Subscribe if you want to make more of your notes and ideas.
🔎 Looking Back to Leap Forward: The Role of Reflection in Your PKM System
I am a firm believer that your perspective on your situation influences the situation itself. If you want your situation to improve, often you just have to change the way you look at it.
Our brains are wired to look ahead, which is great for assessing threats, but it can be overwhelming when it comes to personal growth and achieving big goals.
Years ago, strategic business coach Dan Sullivan popularized the concept of the gap and the gain.
The gap, as he explains it, is how far we have to go. When we set goals, we naturally focus on the gap because they don't happen as quickly as we'd like. We feel like we should have made more progress than we actually have, and we feel frustrated.
But this isn't the only way to look at your situation.
Instead of measuring against an arbitrary point you feel you should have achieved already, you can instead compare your current situation to where you started. When we take time to reflect on what’s behind us, we see the growth and comprehend just how far we've come.
That’s the gain.
Reflection, then, is a necessary component of any PKM system. It helps you shift from the gap to the gain, and in doing so helps you gain the clarity to ignore the things that aren't important and the momentum you need to follow through and take action on the things that are.
And if you follow through and take action consistently on the right things, the score takes care of itself.
In order for it to stick though, your daily reflection system needs to be really simple.
For me, the key is to use a daily template that:
- Helps me focus on the gains of the day.
- Helps me reflect on the things I’m grateful for.
- Is something I can complete in 5 minutes or less.
Daily Questions: The Most Important Part of My Daily Reflection Habit
The prompts you pick are very important, and — if you’re like me — it will take some experimentation to get a structure that works for you.
I have used lots of different prompts and apps, but responding to a set of daily questions is the best way I’ve found to help me keep each day’s gains in perspective.
I first came across the idea of daily questions when I read the book Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith for episode 96 of Bookworm.
The basic idea is to answer a series of questions every day based on the prompt, “Did I do my best to (fill in the blank)?” Here are the daily questions I answer every single day in Obsidian:
Did I do my best to…
- Grow spiritually?
- Love my wife?
- Love my kids?
- Be a good friend?
- Learn something?
- Create something?
- Exercise?
When I sit down to do my daily journaling at the end of the day, I simply rate myself a score on a scale from 1 to 10 (1 being low and 10 being high) based on my intentions. For example, if I'm not feeling 100% and I go for a short run anyway, I might give myself a 10 for the "Did I do my best to exercise?" question. But if I'm training for a half-marathon and I cut short a long run because I'm just not feeling it, I might give myself a 6.
It's important that the scores are not based on the outcomes. I used to use prompts that focused on what I accomplished, and I found that I would get discouraged whenever I didn't have something impressive to put there (I fell back into the gap). Eventually, this led to me giving up on my journaling habit altogether.
But with daily questions, there's less friction because it's based on my intention, not the outcome. As long as I make the effort consistently, the results will come.
Expressing gratitude
Another important part of my reflection practice is a daily gratitude practice.
I tend to be a little bit of a pessimist, so finding problems is pretty easy for me. But expressing gratitude helps me to look past the problems and see what’s working (bringing my focus back to the gain).
As a result, I feel better about my situation because I'm able to find and focus on the good things.
Beyond keeping a quick gratitude log that I can go back and read when I need a boost, my wife and I have a practice of expressing our gratitude to each other during our date nights. We get very specific about something we appreciated the other doing during the past week.
What we’ve learned through this process is that when you verbally express gratitude, it does something inside of you, even when you’re furious at that person or they’re upset with you.
Something Cool: LanguageTool Plugin
Grammarly is a useful tool, but it always seems to be in the way. It's so annoying in Obsidian that I usually turn it off when writing and only turn it back on when I copy the text over to WordPress before publishing.
Fortunately, there's an alternative called LanguageTool that integrates really well into Obsidian. There's even a community plugin that embeds it directly into the Obsidian interface.
I haven't been using the service for very long, but so far I'm impressed. It's not perfect, but it provides grammar tools that are actually useful inside of Obsidian.
If you want some writing help inside of Obsidian but are just as annoyed with the Grammarly popup as I am, check out LanguageTool.
Book Notes: The Gap and the Gain by Dr. Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan
The Gap and the Gain provides realistic strategies to help readers transition from a ‘gap’ mentality to a ‘gain’ mentality through a practice of gratitude and a habit of recognizing progress each day – no matter how small.
And if you want to download my notes for yourself, click this link.
Free PKM Webinar: How to Use Obsidian to Create Consistently & Effortlessly
If you've enjoyed the newsletters I've been sending the last several weeks on The PKM Stack, chances are you'll love the webinar I'm hosting next Tuesday. It's How to Use Obsidian to Create Consistently & Effortlessly, and will dive deep into the Creativity Flywheel framework I use to manage and develop my ideas. If you've ever wished Obsidian could help you be more creative and productive, this webinar is for you.
You can get more details and save your spot here.
— Mike
P.S. This is the 5th email I've sent with the new format, and so far the feedback has been great! I'm still in data-collecting mode though, so if there's anything you particularly like (or dislike) about this newsletter format, please let me know by replying to this email. Just be nice please 🙂
Practical PKM
by Mike Schmitz
A weekly newsletter where I help people apply values-based productivity principles and systems for personal growth, primarily using Obsidian. Subscribe if you want to make more of your notes and ideas.
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