Reflection Practice

Why It Matters

Reflecting is a way to boost critical thinking and self-awareness. You can't course-correct what you never looked at. A quick check-in — daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly, or honestly all of the above at different scales — is what catches a problem early enough to actually fix it, instead of noticing the same mistake months later, after it's already happened a dozen times. Reflection isn't the reward for finishing Plan and Do; it's the step that makes the next round of both worth running.

This is also the stage most tightly coupled to Plan — not a separate loop, the same one. What you notice here doesn't stay here: End-of-Month Wins tell you whether last month's SMART goals actually held up, and Core Goals / Growth Goals become the raw material for next month's Goal Setting & Priorities. Reflect without feeding it back into Plan, and it's just journaling.

How to Reflect

• Write it down right away — jot down details while the event is still fresh in your mind.
• Use guiding questions — ask yourself what happened, how you felt, and what you'd do differently next time.

Tools & Systems

The practice matters more than the tool — Notion, plain paper, an agent with skills, or any other system runs the same loop just as well. Four cadences, all variations on the same handful of prompts:

Retrospectives, Post-Mortems, and Pre-Mortems run the same shape — but they're team/project rituals, not personal cadences, so they live under Team → Agile / Delivery Process.

Capturing Impact

The prompts above tell you what to write about. For how to actually write it, see Capturing Impact — SBI for the quick, interview-ready version, STARR for the detailed one.