Did I do my best to...

There is so much written about the importance of focus to achieve your goals, that it can be distracting.

It's easy to deceive ourselves by thinking that working hard all day long means working in the right things. A simple tactic is to use some kind of metric to check, every day, if we are advancing towards our goal, spending our time and energy in the right things.

In his book Triggers. Creating Behavior That Lasts, world-class coach Marshall Goldsmith shares a straightforward technique he's been using for years. He calls it the "daily questions". Every day, at the end of the day, he asks himself a series of questions. This questions have been crafted to reflect his priorities, the change he wants to achieve.

The first versions of these daily questions asked directly if he had achieved a particular result or taken specific action. Later, with some experience and better understanding of human nature, he changed the formulation to ask if he had done his best possible effort towards that particular result or action. For example, Did I do my best to have a healthy diet? Goldsmith considers this simple mean so important, that he has a person hired to call him every day and ask him the daily questions.

It doesn't have to be the daily questions, but focus goes in hand with some kind of review at the end of the day.

(Photo by Romain Vignes on Unsplash.)