These are questions that are always worth asking yourself. For a list of questions I’m currently asking and investigating, see my /questions page.
Five-Minute Journal Questions
- Morning
- I am 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 (5 minutes)
- What’s one thing I’m grateful for?
- What’s one thing I’m excited about?
- What’s one virtue I want to exhibit?
- What’s one thing I’m avoiding?
- What’s the one thing I need to do?
Evening Questions (5 minutes)
- What were my biggest wins of the day?
- Did I have any major realizations?
- What’s on the agenda for tomorrow?
Bottleneck Breaker
- What’s the biggest bottleneck to achieving my next goal?
- Why aren’t I working on it today?
80/20 Analysis
- Where am I feeling satisfied?
- Where am I feeling dissatisfied?
- 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?
Compounding Projection
- If I repeated every action from today for one year, where would I end up?
- Is this the place I want to be?
Course Correction Questions
- What do I need to spend more time doing?
- What do I need to spend less time doing?
- What do I need to schedule?
- What do I need to do?
- What do I need to be more mindful of?
- What unresolved issues am I overlooking?
- What opportunities are in front of me?
- What obstacles are in my way?
- Am I going in the right direction with my commitments?
- What do I need to add?
- What do I need to delete?
- What do I need to expand?
- What do I need to shrink?
- What have I done well recently?
- Source: The Productivity Project
Forty-Nine Questions to Improve Your Results, by Josh Kaufman
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?
Testing the “Impossible”: 17 Questions That Changed My Life, by Tim Ferriss
- What if I did the opposite for 48 hours?
- What do I spend a silly amount of money on? How might I scratch my own itch?
- What would I do/have/be if I had $10 million? What’s my real TMI (Target Monthly Income)?
- What are the worst things that could happen? Could I get back here?
- If I could only work 2 hours per week on my business, what would I do?
- What if I let them make decisions up to $100? $500? $1,000?
- What’s the least crowded channel?
- What if I couldn’t pitch my product directly?
- What if I created my own real-world MBA?
- Do I need to make it back the way I lost it?
- What if I could only subtract to solve problems?
- What might I put in place to allow me to go off the grid for 4 to 8 weeks, with no phone or email?
- Am I hunting antelope or field mice?
- Could it be that everything is fine and complete as is?
- What would this look like if it were easy?
- How can I throw money at this problem? How can I “waste” money to improve the quality of my life?
- No hurry, no pause.
Useful questions for reframing (Derek Sivers, Useful Not True)
When something goes wrong
- What’s great about this?
- How can I use this to my advantage?
- Does this change the goal, or the path, or nothing?
- How can I reduce the downsides?
When changing direction
- When I was at my happiest, what was I doing?
- What have I strongly wanted for the longest time?
- What’s the opposite of what I usually do?
- Which of my old beliefs are not serving me?
- Forget me. What would be most helpful for others?
When stuck
- What is my one top priority now?
- How can I begin without waiting for anything?
- What advice would I love to hear from an all-knowing sage?
- What am I doing that’s actually a distraction?
- Instead of avoiding mistakes, how can I make more to learn faster?
- Who can help?
To make peace with what’s out of your control
- What happens if I ignore it and do nothing?
- Should I learn a lesson from this, or just move on?
- How can I blame no one, and see this as nobody’s fault?
- How can I be OK no matter what happens?