MandelbrotBack from vacation and I spent the past two hours sifting through my email and clearing the inbox. I have this OCD of keeping my inbox (both personal and work) at 0 unread. The emails which are expected to take longer to go through, process / be replied to are opened in a new window (I use Outlook desktop app for all my emails) and are kept open until I have been through them.
After getting to inbox 0, the first email I opened up the first email and it was the Friday Five newsletter from Sahil Bloom and the very second point hit me and I decided to blog about it. It is a simple question that one must ask themselves every day
What good have I done today?
The question comes from Benjamin Franklin’s daily schedule from his autobiography, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.
Here is a snapshot of his daily schedule:
As you can see at the bottom, right before he used to go to sleep, he would ask himself What good have I done today? I have been trying to get into gratitude journaling at the end of every day to end the day on a positive note and I believe this question perfectly complements that.
What good have I done this day?
Simple, yet quite powerful. We can define good as we so choose:
- good we’ve done for others,
- good we’ve accomplished in our own endeavors, or
- good we’ve done within ourselves
However you choose to define it, asking this question each evening forces you to pause, identify a win, and appreciate it—even just for a moment.
Life is all about momentum and moving the flywheel. Once the flywheel gets moving, the small good and small wins perpetuate into bigger good and bigger wins.