I have been reading a lot of posts recently on a couple of blogs about life and work. They are the best (in my opinion) sites I have come across and am grateful to have stumbled upon them. They are namely zenhabits and The Art of Non-Conformity. They have got me thinking about my day to day activities, my existence and life in general. I was reading a post ”5 powerful reasons to make reflection a daily habit” and it made me write this post.

The post was about reflecting on your life – the uses/reasons to do it and the how to. It got me thinking. If only we would take a few minutes and reflect on our actions, work and life on a daily basis we would understand ourselves much better and make improvements as necessary. This continuous improvement would, I believe, definitely lead to a much happier and fuller life. Let me explain it one by one.

Actions: Your daily actions are a result of prior thinking/planning or a sudden reaction to a trigger or an unconscious reaction that is a pre formed habit/routine. The one with prior thinking/planning is fine obviously. But the other two can be reflected upon. The actions might have been good or bad and could have made a positive or negative effect on the receiver who or whatever it might be. If we take some time to think about it we will realize how we could have done it better and prevented the negative effect or decide to do more of the good actions in the future. Slowly we would be able to take better actions unconsciously since it becomes a habit. This would make us as well as others much happier.

Work: I am sure most people would be doing something or the other as full time job, working from home, your own business etc, etc. Taking time out later in the day to evaluate the work, how well you did it, how satisfied are you, how you feel about doing it would definitely help to improve your performance if you feel you didn’t do good, make changes if you feel doing what you did doesn’t make you happy. Actually this is applicable on a little longer duration of multiple days or weeks because anyone can have a bad day. But a daily reflection is needed to realize it. And it is very important since work takes a major part of your life and hence contributes majorly to your happiness in life.

Life: This is a big one and I am not qualified enough to make big statements or judgments. This reflection is a reflection of your life till that moment. Are you living the life you would love to have? Are you doing the things to reach your goals in life? What is different and how can I change? So minor changes in the right direction at the right moment will help you realize your goals in life. And you will enjoy doing things to realize your goals, thus giving a better and fulfilling life.

I hope this was useful information for you. It shouldn’t take much time to do this. 10 minutes just before going to bed would be perfect. I have decided to follow Leo’s (from zenhabits) tip of writing a one line journal entry daily to reflect on your day. I’ll start  from this day onwards. I have already bought a journal for myself but never wrote a word yet. This would be a perfect way to get that done and also improve myself and live better one day at time.