Questions at the Start of My Notebook

For the past few years, I’ve loosely followed the “Bullet Journal” method of note-taking. Usually in a Leuchtturm1917 Hardcover A5 notebook with dotted pages (the best!).

Whenever I finish one notebook and start another, among other things, I like to write down some key questions and mental models at the front of the new notebook, so that I can easily refer back to them whenever I need to.

Here’s what I’ve written at the start of my current notebook.

Questions to Improve Results

Do I use my body optimally?

• What is the quality of my current diet?
• Do I get enough sleep?
• Am I managing my energy well each day?
• How do I manage daily stress?
• Do I have good posture and poise?
• What can I do to improve my ability to observe the world around me?

Do I know what I want?

• What achievements would make me really excited?
• What “states of being” do I want to experience each day?
• Are my priorities and values clearly defined?
• Am I capable of making decisions quickly and confidently?
• Do I consistently focus my attention on what I want vs. what I don’t want?

What am I afraid of?

• Have I created an honest and complete list of the fears I’m holding on to?
• Have I confronted each fear to imagine how I would handle it if it came to pass?
• Am I capable of recognizing and correcting self-limitation?
• Am I appropriately pushing my own limits?

Is my mind clear and focused?

• Do I systematically externalize (write or record) what I think about?
• Am I making it easy to capture my thoughts quickly, as I have them?
• What has my attention right now?
• Am I regularly asking myself appropriate guiding questions?
• Do I spend most of my time focusing on a single task, or constantly flipping between multiple tasks?
• Do I spend enough time actively reflecting on my goals, projects, and progress?

Am I confident, relaxed, and productive?

• Have I found a planning method that works for me?
• Am I “just organized enough”?
• Do I have an up-to-date list of my projects and active tasks?
• Do I review all of my commitments on a regular basis?
• Do I take regular, genuine breaks from my work?
• Am I consciously creating positive habits?
• Am I working to shed non-productive habits?
• Am I comfortable with telling other people “no”?

How do I perform best?

• What do I particularly enjoy?
• What am I particularly good at doing?
• What environment do I find most conducive to doing good work?
• How do I tend to learn most effectively?
• How do I prefer to work with and communicate with others?
• What is currently holding me back?

What do I really need to be happy and fulfilled?

• How am I currently defining “success”?
• Is there another way of defining “success” that I may find more fulfilling?
• How often do I compare myself to my perceptions of other people?
• Am I currently living below my means?
• If I could only own 100 things, what would they be?
• Am I capable of separating necessity and luxury?
• What do I feel grateful for in my life and work?

(For more great questions, see my “Questions Worth Asking” post.)

Ivy Lee Method

1. Write down the 6 most important things you need to accomplish tomorrow. (No more than 6!)
2. Prioritize those 6 items in order of their true importance.
3. Tomorrow, focus on the first task until it is completed before moving on to the second task, and so on.
4. At the end of the day, move any unfinished items to a new list of 6 tasks for the following day.

Repeat! Do the most important things first.

Impact vs. Effort Matrix

Decisions

Prediction

• What’s the current reality?
• What’s the range of likely future outcomes?
• What do I expect will happen?
• What does the consensus think?
• How do my expectations differ from the consensus?
• What is the worst-case scenario? Am I willing to accept it?
• What is the best-case scenario? How likely is it?

Decision

• What’s my decision?
• What’s the probability that I’m correct?
• If I ignored experience and only considered facts, what choice would I make?
• What am I giving up? By making this decision, what am I not doing?
• How do I feel right now, physically and emotionally?
• How will I feel about this decision when I’m 100 years old?

Review

• What actually happened?
• If good, did I just get lucky? Or was my decision process correct?
• If bad, did I just get unlucky? Or was my decision process incorrect?
• What did I learn?
• How can I improve my decision-making process in the future?

Second-Order Thinking

• If A, then B. And then what?
• What will the consequences be in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years?

Simple Check-In

Notice and write down your objections to this statement: “Everything in my life is exactly the way I want it to be.”

Five-Minute Journal Questions

• Morning
  • What are 3 things I’m grateful for?
  • What would make today great?
  • Daily affirmations: I am…
• Evening
  • What are 3 amazing things that happened today?
  • How could I have made today even better?

Morning Questions

1. What’s one thing I’m grateful for?
2. What’s one thing I’m excited about?
3. What’s one virtue I want to exhibit?
4. What’s one thing I’m avoiding?
5. What’s the one thing I need to do?

Evening Questions

1. What were my biggest wins of the day?
2. Did I have any major realizations?
3. What’s on the agenda for tomorrow?

80/20 Questions

1. Where am I feeling satisfied?
2. Where am I feeling dissatisfied?
3. For each of the above, what are the 20% of places, habits, people, beliefs, etc. that are responsible for 80% of the positive and negative results?

Bottleneck Breaker

1. What’s the biggest bottleneck to achieving my next goal?
2. Why aren’t I working on it today?

Compounding

1. If I repeated every action from today for one year, where would I end up?
2. Is this the place I want to be?

Important vs. Urgent: The Eisenhower Matrix