Simple Questions that Will Improve Your Life Week by Week
By: Meerim Ab
Tags: Time Management, Journaling, Planning, Reflections, Goal Setting

Due to the pandemic, our content consumption habits doubled. Especially watching tons of new TV shows. I’m currently watching “The Crown” and I’m about to subscribe to Disney +. But the blog is not about that.

The concept of TV shows made me think of one very interesting parallel. While watching TV shows, we can see the journey of the main character. How he is living his life, what influences his decisions, and what these decisions lead to.

What if we were able to look at our life as it was some TV show?

We actually can do that. In this blog, I describe one method that helps to understand what your day to day life consists of.

A bit of background story

Every week I make sure I have a “me time” when I can sit down and review my week. It helps me stay on track with my goals and plans. This exercise clears my head from cluttered thoughts.

We tend to think that we can memorize everything that happened during a week. I used to have a good memory but not anymore. The flood of media content today makes it very difficult to memorize anything.

My weekly reviews usually take between 30 minutes to 1 hour, It depends on how busy and intense my week was. I use a template with a set of questions. Every answer to a question is like a piece of a big puzzle called life. To see what our life consist of, we need to capture every element.

List of questions & how each question helps:

Top 3 achievements this week

To see the progress we need to capture it. Goals don’t get achieved in one step or action. It’s a summary of milestones that lead to one bigger achievement. To keep moving you need to see what’s already done, it will release energy for the next steps.

Note that It doesn’t have to be 3 achievements, it can be at least 1 or 5 if you will. As long as you capture your milestone.

Who did you meet or hang out with? What places did you visit?

Who you are today is the choices you make every day. People you interact with are part of these choices and eventually, they shape your interests, lifestyle and perspective. When you spend time with people, apart from just an exchange of opinions, you exchange your energies, positive or negative. That directly impacts how you feel, how you will further behave and what decisions you’ll make.

Though the week is mostly about work, our weekends should be always diverse. It’s a nice habit to capture the places you visited. If a week over a week you have nothing to capture apart from “chilling at home”. Maybe you should re-think your lifestyle and do something about it.

What is most memorable about your week. Why?

Make a note of something memorable that happened to you during a week. It can be a goal you’ve accomplished, or a thought that you want to capture, or some interesting situations, anything that you think is worth remembering.

This question is perfect in two very opposite scenarios in life:

If your day is like a “Groundhog Day”, it will be a good exercise to make your brain try and capture the moments that are worth remembering. It could also push you to work towards a life that will have more moments to remember.

If your days are full of different experiences, events, people, it will be even a better exercise of trying to select the one or two that are significantly memorable and worth capturing in your journal.

Note that it doesn’t have to be an only positive memory. I’ve had weeks when the only memorable situations I had were arguments & tension. I would just sit and reflect. I realized that such situations were appearing more often and I was able to see the trend line. It was clear that I needed to change something in my life as it was not healthy at all.

What have I watched?

Me and my brother like to send some funny videos to each other throughout the day. I think that’s what many people do across the world. While it’s innocent and can cheer you up for a minute, there are cases, where people get into the rabbit hole of videos on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and Youtube.

Video content is food for our brain. It’s up to us to decide what type of food it is. It can be healthy nuts such as snippets of daily news. It keeps you informed and up to date. However, if you exceed the limit of daily nuts, it will leave you bloated and gassy. Your stomach will suffer to digest it. The same happens to our brains when we consume too much news. It will affect our sleep as the brain will spend more time processing it overnight (increased REM). You will end up waking up tired the next morning. Yes, there is a chain of events.

To look at what you feed your brain with, start capturing your video consumption. Some great insights will follow after a few weeks of tracking.

What have I read this week? Did I learn something new?

On more topic about content consumption. Similar reasons to what I’ve described in the previous paragraph. We read news, posts, blogs, books, articles and reviews, and tons of different mediums. We input all that information into our brains. So the question remains the same? What are we feeding our brain with? Track for a few weeks and adjust accordingly.

What’s my focus on next week?

That’s the beauty of weekly reflection. You decide what to focus on next week instead of going with the flow. It gives you time to look at your goals and choose what you need to pay attention to. And if next week, your focus gets shifted to something else, you will get to spot your distractions. It’s powerful to see what’s influencing our priorities throughout the week, which makes us shift from the initial intents. Gather data, discover insights, and adjust accordingly.

A few words about your week

It’s a journaling exercise. It’s a flow of your thoughts. Sum up your week, clear up your head from cluttered thoughts. Capture some ideas. This exercise has no rules. Just keep writing.

Conclusion

Think of this weekly exercise as your TV show that has 52 episodes. Every episode is your week that consists of key elements, characters and places. By your season finale, which is the last two weeks of December, you can review your show called “My 52 weeks” and prepare scripts for your future show that will be better than the previous one. The only difference that the next year will be based on real insights and learnings.

Sources used in the blog

Stats of streaming views during lockdown in the UK https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-53637305