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“Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.”
Peter Drucker
I look back on a year of my life in about an hour.
Each night I write in a pocket journal what went well, what I could have improved and what surprised me.
On Sundays, I build a weekly review from the daily reviews. The wins that mattered most and the improvements that still matter carry into it.
Each month I build a monthly review from the weeks. Then I build a quarterly review from the months and a yearly review from the quarters.
The Boston surgeon Ernest Codman kept a written record of how each of his surgeries turned out.
For each patient he wrote down what was wrong, what he did and how it went. A year later he checked on the patient and added how they were doing.
Reading those records back, he found 123 mistakes and traced each one to its cause.
Some came from a gap in his skill. Others came from a bad call during surgery, poor equipment or a wrong diagnosis.
In 1916 he published all 123.
Other surgeons shunned him for it. His idea that hospitals should track their results grew into the Joint Commission. That group still inspects American hospitals.
William Mallon tells the story in Ernest Amory Codman: The End Result of a Life in Medicine.
Harvard researchers tested end-of-day writing at a call center in India. New hires there spent weeks in training before they took their first calls.
One group spent the last 15 minutes of each day writing about what they learned. Another group kept working. On the final test, the writers scored 23% higher.
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What question could you answer each night before bed?
