Daniel Kestenholz

Paving the way for people with great ideas for improving the world

Daniel

Reflection

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One thing I’ve changed in 2020 has been to shift (even) more time towards structured reflection. The volatile and sometimes chaotic environment this year provided a helpful nudge for what would have been worthwhile without it already. In this post, I’ll elaborate on the benefits of reflection as I currently see them and suggest ways to implement it in practice.

Most readers will have an intuitive sense of what I mean by “reflection”, but to be safe: By reflection, I mean taking a break from what you’d otherwise be doing to examine what’s currently happening.

Motivation

Let’s start with why you’d want to reflect in the first place. Based on my own experience at work, as well as observing people who I regard as highly successful in their career, and studying materials on learning and deliberate practice in the context of my coach training, my current understanding is that reflection is mainly useful in the following ways:

  1. Learning and development: Reflection helps you extract maximum learning from experience accumulated in the past, which can improve performance significantly more than spending the same amount of time to accumulate additional experience. By articulating and codifying your past experience, you cultivate a deeper level of insight into the causal relationship between actions and outcomes. Reflection also nudges you to explore issues from multiple perspectives rather than just going with your first intuition.
  2. Prioritisation and alignment: Reflection helps you clarify what matters to you, notice where you’re at right now relative to what matters, and see what you need to do to close the gap. It’s a way of thinking about what you do strategically, leading to an increased alignment between your values and actions. Without reflection, on the other hand, you tend to drift and get distracted by the good opportunities while missing out on the great ones.
  3. Motivation and self-efficacy: Finally, reflection can help you look at your situation with fresh eyes — an antidote to boredom and stagnation. It can help you see richness and possibilities in a way that rejuvenates you and builds momentum towards your goals. Further, reflecting on past experience with a specific task tends to reduce your uncertainty about your ability to perform that task competently in the future, leading to increased self-efficacy and future performance.

What you want to get from reflection might look different from the above, so I’d encourage you to clarify that before you start since the right reflection practice might look very different depending on what you’re optimising for.

Implementation

Having a sense of what we’re trying to get from reflection, we can now consider what to do in practice. Again, I’d expect that the ideal solution will look very different depending on your preferences and environment, so take some time to consider what might work for you.

On a fundamental level, establishing a reflection practice is about deciding when and where to direct your attention. The first part is about time: When and for how long do you want to pause and reflect? The second part is about content: What do you want to do during that time?

To determine when and for how long to reflect, consider if there are any specific times when reflection would be most useful, given what you’re trying to get from it — for instance, making a deliberate decision at the start of the day about what you’ll work on that day. Also, consider whether there are any natural time intervals in your life that you can use as an anchor — for instance, the start or end of the workday.

Before you can decide for how long you want to reflect, you probably need to get a better sense of how you’ll use that time. Here, think about where you’d have to direct your attention to accomplish your desired outcome, and what guidance and prompts would help you with that. The four directions for reflection by David B. Peterson, former Senior Director of Executive Coaching and Leadership at Google, help illustrate the point about directing your attention:

  1. Look inward: What is most important to you? What are your goals, and what are you doing to achieve them?
  2. Look outward: What matters most to others? What expectations do they hold that you need to address in order to be successful at your endeavours? How do they perceive you?
  3. Look back: What have you been trying to learn and what new things have you tried? What has worked well and what hasn’t worked? What have you learned?
  4. Look ahead: What will you do differently? What do you need to keep learning? Where are your opportunities to try new things?

Based on the above steps, you can come up with a reflection schedule — see the next section for an example. For many people, starting small and building their way forward towards their ideal schedule instead of making one large shift will have a higher chance of success. Pick one new reflection point and build it into your existing systems in a way that ensures you’ll actually do it. Schedule a time in the future when you’ll evaluate how the new routine is going and decide whether and how to adjust it.

Sample reflection schedule

Below is a collection of individual reflection points that together make up a reflection schedule. It’s ordered chronologically and in increasing order of time investment. The idea is inspired by David B. Peterson who’s been mentioned above already. You could expand the schedule and add quarterly, annual, and even less frequent reflection points using the same principles.

Momentarily (10 seconds)

Whenever you snap out of “autopilot” and become present again:

  • Zoom out: What’s important now?
  • Zoom in: What’s the next step?
  • Alternatively: Who do you want to be, right now?

Hourly (1-3 minutes)

This is roughly the level of an individual task. Here, you could ask yourself at the start:

  • Desired outcome: What are you trying to achieve?
  • Benefits: Why does it matter?
  • Obstacles: What might make this difficult?
  • Plan: What are the individual steps?

Daily (5-10 minutes)

At the start of the day:

  • What are the three most important tasks for the day?
  • When are you going to work on them?
  • What else matters today?

At the end of the day:

  • What went well today?
  • What didn’t go well today?
  • What do you want to do differently tomorrow/moving forward?

Weekly (10-30 minutes)

Look back over the previous week:

  • What progress did you make? How satisfied are you with that?
  • What did you learn?
  • Meta: What other useful questions could you ask yourself at this point?

Look forward over the week ahead:

  • What’s important in the week ahead? How can you meet your monthly goals?
  • What are the 4-6 most important tasks you want to accomplish this week?
  • What are your key learning opportunities?

Monthly (15-60 minutes)

Look back over the previous month:

  • What progress did you make? How satisfied are you with that?
  • What went well and why? What can you improve and how?
  • How much are you enjoying your work right now, 1-10? How to make it a 10?

Look forward over the month ahead:

  • What are the three most important objectives for the next three months?
  • What can you do this month to make progress towards them?
  • What else matters this month?

If you’d like to explore these ideas further, here are a few resources you might find useful:

Self-care

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Self-care is challenging yet essential for almost anything you care about. In this post, I’m going to address why I think that’s true, and offer a few strategies that you can implement to manage yourself more deliberately.

If you’d prefer a more animated version of this post, you can find a recording of my talk on self-care at the Effective Altruism Student Summit 2020 at the bottom of this page.

Why it matters

By “self-care”, I mean paying attention to and supporting your physical and mental well-being. It’s a broad category, including things like the state of your mind, emotions, relationships, and resources.

Your physical and mental well-being matters both intrinsically and instrumentally. It matters intrinsically because your well-being is valuable in its own right. Whatever you can do to increase your well-being is a good thing. I emphasise this point because it often gets left out of the discussion around self-care, which typically centres around how self-care can make you more productive at work.

Besides, your physical and mental well-being matters instrumentally, as it’s arguably one of the critical ingredients to almost anything you may want to achieve in life. For instance, if you want to maximise your lifetime impact, you’ll find that hard to do while struggling with your own health. Instead, you’ll likely burn out and quit before you’ve reached the positions where you can have the biggest impact. This way, you’ll help others less overall and suffer yourself at the same time — a lose/lose situation.

One way to look at the instrumental value of self-care is through the frame of the cycle of sacrifice and renewal. It’s a simple model that has two parts: “Sacrifice” is any activity that burns through your reserves in the pursuit of your goals, and “renewal” is any activity that replenishes your reserves and builds capacity for the next sacrifice cycle. You need both parts for maximum effectiveness and productivity. How much you get out of each sacrifice cycle depends on how well you manage the renewal part.

This model shows that you can’t afford not to take care of yourself, and whatever you can do to renew yourself is itself productive work. Athletes understand this and plan their periods of stress and recovery accordingly. A few years ago, I started viewing myself as a “corporate athlete” because it raised the bar and evoked the right attitude and behaviour for me. A label that actually made me smarter.

Why it’s hard

Many factors push against good self-care, especially among altruistic and ambitious people. I’ll name a few factors to make a case for why it’s hard to look after oneself and to motivate the next section.

  1. Limited self-awareness: It’s hard to notice how you’re feeling and whether your needs are met — it requires the capacity for introspection and space where you can slow down and turn off external noise and distractions.
  2. Delayed consequences: Self-care habits compound over time, which means that the most significant outcomes lag behind. The lack of immediate results makes it hard to start and maintain good self-care habits and notice and stop bad ones.
  3. Achievement drive: Your internal ambition and drive can make you somewhat mindlessly focused on getting things done in the moment and cause you to lose perspective on how you manage yourself over time.
  4. Demandingness and social comparison: It’s somewhat common for people who discover effective altruism to feel like they now have to spend every waking hour toward helping others, continually feeling like they’re not doing enough. Social comparison with “the most impactful people” in the community can reinforce this dynamic and put altruists under a lot of pressure.
  5. Lack of supportive social cues: Many social environments don’t inspire and reward good self-care habits, but instead reinforce a sacrifice mindset. Moreover, what others are doing to take care of themselves is often invisible to you, leading to a false impression that “others don’t need it.”
  6. Biased view of future time slack: In general, people expect that they’ll have more idle time in the future than they do in the present, leading them to make more sacrifices now with the promise of investing more into recovery later. And when tomorrow comes, they repeat the same mistake.

How to start

Disclaimer: I’m not a medical professional, and I’m not giving medical advice. If you believe that you might have more serious mental or physical health issues, please reach out to a professional. As a threshold, consider whether your mental and physical health is interfering with your capacity to function in daily activities, both professionally and personally. You could reach out to Ewelina Tur who offers psychotherapy for EAs.

I believe that the best self-care strategies depend a lot on the person and their context. However, there are a few high-level strategies that seem robustly positive, which I’m sharing below. I encourage you to take them as a starting point for your reflection and experimentation.

  1. Set boundaries: The people I work with (myself included) are typically “happy workaholics” who love what they do and always have more work to do. They have a bias towards sacrifice over renewal, and they find it hard to strike the right balance in the moment. They need to make decisions about how they manage themselves in advance, by setting and enforcing supportive boundaries. Schedule time in your calendar for renewal every day, and treat it as if it was a work meeting.
  2. Establish self-care routines: Fill the space that you’ve created above with practices that reliably rejuvenate you. Those might look very different from person to person. The important thing is to find something that works for you, start small wherever you’re at right now, and do it consistently. Here are a few strategies that I’ve found helpful:
    • Mindfulness: Create quiet moments in your day to tune in to what’s going on inside you. Regular practice increases your self-awareness, which allows you to make good choices about how you manage yourself. Any method that helps you to become aware and attend to your experience is helpful — it could be meditation, journaling, or an honest conversation with an empathic friend.
    • Exercise: Exercise has a myriad of benefits. The key is to find some form of physical activity that you enjoy and can do regularly. It can be as simple as going for a walk after work or doing a 7-Minute Workout every day.
    • Sleep hygiene: Sleep amplifies or diminishes almost everything else that you do. There are many articles out there on how to get a good night’s sleep, so I’ll only cover a few key points: Try to go to bed and wake up at the same time every day. Do calming activities before bed and after you get up, such as stretching, journaling, or going for a walk. Pay attention to how your actions and environment affect your sleep quality and improve what you do over time.
    • Seeking joy: There’s a risk that your self-care practice turns into yet another obligation, to the point where it feels more like additional sacrifice rather than renewal. To avoid this, deliberately choose to play a different game during your self-care time. Merely do what you enjoy, without aiming for some other outcome. Do whatever makes you feel alive in the present moment. Stop where it starts to feel like work.
  3. Reflect regularly: Reflection allows you to step back and evaluate how you’re currently doing, assess how effective your self-care strategies are, and decide what you might want to do differently moving forward. It allows you to monitor the changes in your life and stay tuned in to potential wake-up calls and notice early when you’re heading down the wrong path.
    • Daily: Set aside one minute at the end of your workday to check in with yourself and deliberately choose how you’re going to use your downtime for renewal.
    • Weekly: Look back and reflect on how you’ve managed yourself during the previous week. Look ahead and anticipate the demands on your resources in the week ahead, and make a plan for how you’ll manage the cycle of sacrifice and renewal.

Reflection

I’d encourage you to take a few minutes right now to reflect on the following:

  1. What are your learnings and takeaways from this post?
  2. Based on those, what do you want to do differently moving forward?
  3. What’s one thing you can start doing today? What exactly will you do?
  4. How can you make sure that happens?

If you take away one thing from this post, let it be this: Identify your most important daily self-care habit and find a way to do it consistently.

This is the recording of my talk on self-care at the Effective Altruism Student Summit 2020.

If you’d like to explore these ideas further, here are a few resources you might find useful:

Energy Log

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Being able to show up energized and motivated every day is necessary to achieve big goals and enjoy the process. This post presents a tool to benchmark your current energy levels as the basis for improvement.

Energy levels are a complex issue where causal links are hard to establish. There are too many variables at play to be highly confident about any particular interaction. However, you can often make meaningful improvements by becoming aware of your patterns and running targeted experiments.

The first step is to collect data on your current energy levels. I suggest using an Energy Log every day for 2-3 weeks to keep track of a few variables that have a good chance of influencing your energy levels. In a second step, you can evaluate the data and look for patterns, and come up with ideas for experiments to increase energy levels.

If you’d like to explore these ideas further, here are a few resources that you might find useful:

Issue Log

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Mistakes are one of our best opportunities to learn and improve. Unfortunately, we’re conditioned to associate mistakes with failure instead of opportunity and to deny or turn away from them. This way, we end up staying the same and likely making the same mistakes over and over again. To start learning from mistakes requires a change in mindset and habit. This post presents a few ideas on the former and a tool for the latter.

Pros are just amateurs who know how to gracefully recover from their mistakes.

Kevin Kelly

The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them—especially not from yourself.

Daniel C. Dennett

Mindset

  • Mistakes are inevitable. No matter how careful you are, you will make mistakes.
  • Mistakes don’t define you. Disassociate your self-worth from the outcome. Don’t identify with the painful thoughts and feelings associated with mistakes. Instead, be kind and understanding toward yourself.
  • Learning is a top priority. Whatever your goal, there’s a good chance that investing in your learning is among the highest-value things you can do. In the long run, the learning benefits from mistakes often outweigh their cost.
  • Invest in mistakes. If you want to get good at something, you need to spend a lot of time being bad at it. View mistakes as an investment, rather than something to avoid.
  • Maximize your curiosity. Mistakes educate you in the same way that successes do. Recognize that there’s something to learn for you here, and develop a desire to find an answer.
  • Pain + reflection = progress. Pain and other unpleasant feelings are a useful signal that there’s something to learn. Take a step back and reflect when you experience pain.
  • It’s an iterative process. You don’t have to get this right in one single step. Taking smaller steps and failing more often is a way to succeed sooner.

Routine

I recommend using an Issue Log (adopted from Ray Dalio) to develop a habit of learning from mistakes and “failing better”. Here’s how the tool works, step by step:

  1. Notice that you’ve made a mistake, or that something in your system isn’t working correctly—this is the cue that triggers the routine below.
  2. Accept and acknowledge the issue. Notice any emotional reaction with self-compassion. Reframe the situation as an opportunity to learn and improve.
  3. Log the issue. Using a new row on the Issue Log, write down what happened. Try to do this immediately while your recollection of events is fresh. Decide which of the following categories best describes the issue:
    1. Random accident: Simple statistical fluctuations that don’t hint at any systematic issues. The best response is to acknowledge the issue and move on.
    2. Enduring weakness: Mistakes that happen predictably over and over again but that you can’t simply eliminate because the source of mistakes is hard to change. The best response is to avoid situations that prompt these mistakes.
    3. Growth opportunity: Mistakes that happen predictably but where you can identify the source and fix the system. This is where you want to direct your attention. Ask yourself what you can learn from this event and what you can do differently next time.
  4. Reflect on the issue and identify learnings, again using the Issue Log. Do this periodically, such as once a week or month.
  5. Improve your systems based on insights from the above procedure.

If you’d like to explore these ideas further, here are a few books that you’ll find useful:

Career Reflection Framework

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In early 2019, I felt stuck in my career and took this as an opportunity to reflect on my situation and career prospects. Here, I’m sharing the framework that emerged from this period. I’ve removed personal content so you can directly apply it to your own career.

The framework helps you work through a complex career decision. It guides each critical step along the way, including setting goals for the process, making an assessment of your current situation, getting clear on what a great career looks like for you, coming up with lots of options, collecting data to inform your choice, and making and executing a plan.

That doesn’t mean that the process will be easy. Career choice is cognitively complex and emotionally charged. The problem is ill-defined and resistant to resolution. There’s a good chance that you’ll experience difficult emotions along the way, feel stuck and overwhelmed, under pressure and uninspired.

That’s why having a robust framework is vital. In addition, starting with the right mindset can make a big difference. Here are some suggestions:

  1. Get curious: This is an excellent opportunity to learn new things about yourself and the world. Your career is never done or solved. It’s a constant iteration.
  2. Have a bias to action: Build your way forward. Accept the situation you’re in right now and find something that’s actionable. Try things until you find what works.
  3. Reframe problems: Identify dysfunctional beliefs that keep you stuck, and find more productive re-framings that help you get unstuck and open up new solution spaces.
  4. Know it’s a process: Finding your way will take time and involve setbacks. Let go of the end goal and focus on the process and see what happens next.
  5. Ask for help: Get support from your social network. The resources are there. People are willing to help you. You just need to ask. 🙂

With that in mind, let’s get started.

1. Mindsets adapted from the book “Designing Your Life” by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
2. If you’re interested in career coaching, please get in touch.