Periodic self reflection is a way to become a better person. I use org-ql to help me pick what activity I can self reflect upon.

Sometimes ago I read "No More Feedback" by Carol Sanford. The author's point about self reflection has inspired me since: rather than tell others what they are doing wrong or they could better, facilitate their self-reflection.

Self reflecting is thinking about a past action/behavior and see how to make it better. This is better because the person reflecting can come up with their own best solution (which definitely isn't yours: innovation!).

Well, before applying this on others I wanted to start facilitating self-reflection for myself.

I tend to do a lot of things and that busyness rarely let me self reflect.

Well I guess the issue is everywhere really: from school's exams to work performance reviews, you can always find somebody telling how you can be better. As Carol points out in her book, this form of input constrains you in the expectations of others which most of the time is not good for you on the long term. For instance, say I have a family member that leaves in a city without hospital: I could tell them they would be better off by moving to one that has it because I needed an hospital in the past. That may make sense for my situation, while they could never want/need to use a hospital in their life for whatever reason. If they were to follow my suggestion without understanding/sharing my context, they would move without understanding why and possibly become less happy in the process. That usually creates even bigger issues.

And a lot of time following orders without understanding the deepest reasons (and so outsourcing responsibilities) cause major disasters for the many.

Maybe self reflecting on what we did (and plan to do) can also give us more control of our lives. And if others copy us, well everybody will be better off (and they will be far more interesting people to share our time with).

I spend a lot of time working in Emacs, so I thought my favourite editor could nudge me to self reflect.

My first iteration has been to add a habit to my agenda that reminds me to reflect every 3 days.

I install org-habit like this:

(use-package org-habit
  :ensure nil
  :defer 9
  :config
  ;; enable org-habit tracking
  (add-to-list 'org-modules 'org-habit))

and my habit for self reflection looks like this:

* TODO self reflect]: pick a task/decision/action of this week and note down an improvement
SCHEDULED: <2022-10-02 Sun .+1d/3d>
:PROPERTIES:
:STYLE: habit
:REPEAT_TO_STATE: TODO
:END:

After a few reflections, I thought one thing that I could possibly tackle is tasks that I postpone all the times. So I came up with an org-ql query that orders my completed tasks for last week by the time they waited for my action:

(defun my/org-delta-scheduled-created (headline)
  (or (ignore-errors (--> headline
                          (nth 1 it)
                          (ts-diff
                           (ts-parse (--> (plist-get it :closed)
                                          (nth 1 it)
                                          (plist-get it :raw-value)
                                          (s-split "\\[" it)
                                          (nth 1 it)
                                          (s-split " " it)
                                          car))
                           (ts-parse (--> (plist-get it :CREATED)
                                          (s-split "\\[" it)
                                          (nth 1 it)
                                          (s-split " " it)
                                          car)))))
      0))

(--> (org-ql-query
       :from (org-agenda-files)
       :where
       `(and (done)
             (not (habit))
             (scheduled :from ,(format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d" (org-read-date nil t "-1w")))))
     (--sort
      (> (my/org-delta-scheduled-created it) (my/org-delta-scheduled-created other))
      it)
     (--map
      `(,(--> it
              (nth 1 it)
              (plist-get it :raw-value))
        ,(/ (my/org-delta-scheduled-created it) 60 60 24))
      it)
     (cons '(done-task days-needed) (cons 'hline it))
     )

This relies on me adding a :CREATED property every time I capture a task and a :CLOSED property when I complete it. The code above calculates the difference between these times in days and sorts the entries.

So if I have no idea what to self reflect on, I can run this code block and see some tasks that I have delayed for many days and think what went wrong there. Of course, there may be something more important to reflect upon, but this is just to help myself.

This is what I am trying lately to improve myself! A bit of self reflecting on my busy life by adding an habit in my agenda and sorting the last week tasks by latency.

Hope you will have time to try (more) self reflection too.

Happy self-reflecting!