Catchy title? Check.
Appropiate topic? Check.
Interesting story? Check.
Sympathetic people? Check.
Real world problems? Check.
Common sense approach? Check.
Actionable advice? Check.
They why do I hate this post so much?
Because it's so 1990s.
Waiting until the end of the day to evaluate it is way too late. What once took days now takes hours, even minutes. You need to be doing the recommendations in this post all day long, dymamically, as you go. If you're looking back, you already lost.
Then what should you actually be doing with the last 5 minutes of your 2011 day?
Make a "list" of the #1 thing that you must complete tomorrow.
This one little item will probably have more impact on tomorrow's success that anything you could possibly do about today's.
Im sorry, but this seems like a terrible, short-sighted bit of lunacy. Yes, you should be noting things all day, but taking the time to review your notes as a cohesive whole seems to be the point. It will let you see bigger patterns. It will help you deduce what you could be doing tomorrow for your "#1 task".
Think of it like an optimization problem, small tweaks based on limited feedback will get you caught in a local maximum -- seriously, what you described is basically a genetic algorithm. When you step back and notice general trends, things that turn into inefficient tweak loops and so on, there is a lot of good that can come from it.
GO! GO! GO! is not a sane mentality, and has never helped me do much but get work done. This is useful, excepting of course those situations where the work itself isn't useful but I can't see that because I don't look back and analyze. Looking back on today and this week is a nice way to keep perspective, get some peace and have big picture understanding of what is going well and isn't.
> Waiting until the end of the day to evaluate it is way too late.
> What once took days now takes hours, even minutes.
To put this into practice, set a timer to go off every 60 seconds. At the end of this period, reflect back over the previous 60 seconds. By the end of the day you'll have become so good at reflecting that whenever you stay still in public long enough, random women will use you to apply their makeup.
You can't reflect on the same level, with the same depth, by analyzing your day constantly, as opposed to looking back at the end of the day. If you could, nothing would ever go wrong, because you would have thought about it when you were doing it.
I contend that thinking about how everything is going constantly is more likely to stress you out and cause you to make bad decisions than simply reflecting for half an hour at the end of each day.
The day-trader approach to life vs. the value investor approach.
"You can do so much in 10 minutes' time. Ten minutes, once gone, are gone for good. Divide your life into 10-minute units and sacrifice as few of them as possible in meaningless activity."
Remember that just because you're not working does not mean your're engaging in "meaningless activity." Taking a vacation or spending time with loved ones are perfectly acceptable ways to spend those 10-minute units.
And just because you're working doesn't mean you're working on the right things, or the things that will have the most effect, or working towards the right goals.
This is only occasionally important to engineer/programmer types (and that's definitely not who this is geared toward in the author's defense -- it's Harvard Business Review for god's sake). You definitely should be taking stock _sometimes_ of "how things went with your team" or whatever, but it's not even close to how best to use the last 5 minutes of a day.
The best use of the last 5 minutes of my work day, without question, is making a few comments on about half a sheet of paper of what open questions I have for tomorrow and a couple of directions I might head to solve them, along with caveats/gotchas I thought of while working.
This way when I let go of work for the day, I don't think about it anymore unless I really want to and I'm confident that I have enough written down to hit the ground running the next time I want to work.
This frees me up completely to do something _besides_ work.
I know your comment is basically part of the central premises of "Getting Things Done" but your words "This way when I let go of work for the day.." resonated with me.
Perhaps today is when I start using those last 5 minutes to take at least one note a day.
I'm actually really terrible of letting go of work, but one of the things I noticed is that part of that is the fact that I'm trying to keep track of too much in my head.
"I'll have to remember to copy config file X over if I move process Y to machine Z tomorrow"
"I have to factor out that piece of code, this will be the 3rd time I've written something similar"
"Call person about thing"
"Email other person about other thing"
Instead, with my piece of paper, I remember one thing:
I agree, to a point. That kind of thinking definitely has a place, and it works wonders for productivity I'm sure.
You're talking about making it clear what you need to do tomorrow, making a plan so you always know what to do next.
This article, though, is talking about evaluating your goals and methods, something far beyond "next actions". Are you even headed in the right direction? Is your strategy as effective as you thought?
No matter how excellent your work is, you need to be working on excellent things.
>She saw that she was working so hard and moving so fast, that even if she was delivering quality results, she was working against herself, putting her job at risk, and making things harder for everyone.
Many interesting things have been said in the comments, so only one short thing to add: don't do this right before you attempt to fall asleep. Putting your mind into the state where you consider the deep strategic implications of your day is not conducive to quickly falling asleep. The advice to carve out time at the end of your WORK is appropriate; follow this with play/relaxation.
I'm doing this now without realizing it. I started last September and I haven't missed a day since. I write a short entry everyday in a "journal" detailing what happened in my day, how I felt, what I did, where I went, etc. It's quite nice reading entries from a few months ago.
Personally, I much prefer taking stock in the early afternoon. That's the time when I tend to be feeling low on energy and motivation, and need an extra bit of inspiration to keep me going. And if I decide/discover that I need to make some change in my life, I can do it that day.
What happens when you start reflecting on the day (or planning the next) late at night? You get excited, or you remember something you forgot to do -- either way, that makes it hard to sleep. And the next day, all the enthusiasm is lost.
I'd say I do this more on an "as-needed" basis, which I doubt is every day.
I typically do sit down at the end of the day and go over a list of all the things that have been done and those still yet to do and prepare a plan of attack for the next day, which, from time to time, does include improvements in workflow.
Over the last year or two, I've taken to thorough note-taking. Every time I'm on a phone call, I take notes. Whenever I'm working on some bit of code and happen to see something that needs improved later, make an improvement, get an idea about a feature, etc. I take notes. Whenever I review things with a client, I take notes.
They're all handwritten, with a good pen, in Mead notebooks I get for $0.15/each during "back to school" sales. Each project gets its own (labelled) notebook, and I have another one for miscellaneous notes.
This all sounds very simple and obvious, but the act of physically writing things down in a book I can flip through, mark things out of, and scribble on (vs. typing them in a text file to get lost somewhere on the hard drive, or in an application I have to open amongst other windows) has done wonders for my productivity.
The main point of this piece is not that you take time at the end of the day, or in the middle, or a few times throughout. The point is that, whenever you do it, you need to take time to think, time to reflect on what you've been doing. If you never take time to reflect and answer some of the nagging bigger questions, you severely short-change your long-term effectiveness.
I've been running an experiment recently to take at least 15 minutes each day to think about my research (I do neuroscience research for a university in DC). The results have been great, and I'm starting to add in more reflective time throughout the day, even when I'm not 'working'. If you're interested, I have been, and will continue to be, writing about it here: http://joshrule.com/blog. Look for posts about trial 2.
This advice applies to organisations as much as it does to people. Companies need to take some time out to think about what worked, what didn't and why not. And they also need to encourage folks to speak up about failures and be prepared to listen to rants, complaints and concerns that employees.
This sounds really easy, but it's amazes me how many companies just don't want to listen to bad news. A surefire way to detect a crappy company is by their reaction when employees complain. The really great companies listen and get the management to act. The mediocre companies suggest that the employee take the initiative and act. The lousy companies just blame the employee.
I like to spend the last 5 minutes of a day with an interesting problem I need to tackle the next day. Then think about it as I try to fall asleep. Sometimes though rarely I dream about it, but for sure when I wake up, I'm thinking about it.
What I think is pretty interesting, is that this is precisely what religious people do when they pray. Even if god is imaginary, praying forces you to spend 5 minutes reflecting.
Because it's so 1990s.
Waiting until the end of the day to evaluate it is way too late. What once took days now takes hours, even minutes. You need to be doing the recommendations in this post all day long, dymamically, as you go. If you're looking back, you already lost.
Then what should you actually be doing with the last 5 minutes of your 2011 day?
Make a "list" of the #1 thing that you must complete tomorrow.
This one little item will probably have more impact on tomorrow's success that anything you could possibly do about today's.