A Daily Review

Daily reviews help you learn faster, appreciate more, and stay in the moment.

When months go by like weeks and weeks like days, you’re running on autopilot.

A daily review can break this monotony. Forcing you to pause, reflect and be in the moment.

For centuries Kale and many others, excelling in all domains, have followed this practice.
Kale has shared his method to help you kickstart yours.

“I spend between 15 to 30 minutes at the end of my day reflecting on questions.”

1. (outcomes) What did I get out of the day, and what did it achieve?
2. (behaviour) Was I a good human, and did I do things that align with my values?
3. (productivity) Where did I spend my time, and could I automate or outsource the tasks I worked on?
4. (tomorrow) What do I want to do tomorrow?

His template is public and accessible for you to copy and use.

Kale tracks his time using Toggl and uses his daily toggl report to help answer the questions from above. However, you can get by.

You can read about Kale’s full daily productivity practice here, including instructional loom videos.

Sahil Blooms Simple Content Model

Every business I’ve ever been a part of has consistently struggled to find new content ideas.

Often this results in people spending a ton of wasted time sitting around trying to think of content they can create for the week.

Sitting down and thinking about/ideating content creation and curation doesn’t work from what I’ve seen. Or at least it is ineffective.

Sahil Bloom publishes 100,000+ words a year and even more goes unpublished. And his content production process is entirely ad-hoc. No planning sessions, no scheduled time and no content calendar.

His only structure is a note with the types and topics of content he’s interested in creating for, called content buckets, like so.

1. Education – Mental models, finance, business & decision-making frameworks
2. Stories – Wiki style stories about interesting historical characters or business leaders that people haven’t heard of.

Then he lets living do the rest.

As he goes about his week, with those content types and topics in mind, he takes a note whenever he comes across something that sparks his interest.

“A lot of this is happening in real-time.” For example, I wrote a hit thread on Gamestop when that story became part of the news cycle.”

The trick here is simple. Live your life and pay attention to what’s happening around you. The ideas will come. When inspiration strikes, get out your phone and take notes.

What do your customers talk to you about? What are you reading and hearing? What’s the topic of conversation at this weeks all-hands meeting? How are customers using your product and so on.

Capturing them helps Sahil find ~10 content ideas a day. At any given time, he has 100’s of ideas ready to go.

I do the same for this email. I don’t have to sit down and think about what I’m going to write. I already have a notepad full of ideas ready to go.

“Movements are what take five or ten per cent of people and make them decisive—because in a world where apathy rules, five or ten per cent is an enormous number.”

~ Bill McKibben

The Imitation Fallacy

Imitation flatters the imitated but leads the copier to failure.

Let’s assume the intention of copying another is to achieve the same outcome as them.

Disregarding the obvious fact that the environment you contend with will never be completely the same as the other persons.

Imitation presents other errors we should consider.

We don’t know what game the other person is playing.

You can watch this in financial markets. When share prices increase, they often continue to rise at an increasing pace.

Increasing share prices attract traders. Traders are just looking to profit on price momentum. A value investor sucked into imitating the trader is likely to get wrecked.

We don’t know the rules of their game.

Traders may have an investment horizon of 3 days. In contrast, the value investor has an investment horizon of 5 years.

The trader is looking to make a 50% return in a week. In comparison, the value investor is looking to make 12% per annum.

We can be fooled the same way in business.

A competitor could be running a promotion because their sales manager needs to hit a revenue target to earn a bonus.

While we, the business owners, have reduced our profit margin and profit.

One person just increased their earnings, while we reduced ours.

Before imitating, we need to know the game that we’re playing and the rules of our game. Only then will we know if imitation will work for us.