A Review Needs Two Points

You cannot plot a course from a single point. One position tells you where you are. It takes two to tell you where you are going.

I think that is why so many journaling practices stall. People do not stop writing. They keep writing, faithfully, and the writing gives them one point, over and over: today, described in detail. A single point, however carefully recorded, cannot tell you whether you are drifting or making progress.

A review needs two things. It needs material worth reviewing, and it needs a direction to review that material against. Most people who journal have some version of the first. Almost no one has the second written down anywhere the review can reach.

Weather and instruments

Here is how I journal, and I suspect it is close to how you do it. Something happens in my day, I have a reaction, and I get the reaction down on the page. Then in my review the next morning, I read back what I wrote a week ago, a month ago, and a year ago on this date.

That is genuinely useful. Reading your own thinking from a year back is one of the few ways to see how much you have changed, or how little.

But notice what that kind of entry can do and what it cannot. If the page records what I thought and how the day felt, then reviewing it returns what I thought and how the day felt. It gives me the weather: the storms and the sunshine of my inner life. It may be accurate. It may even be interesting. It is still the weather.

So I have started sorting journal entries into two kinds. There is weather, and there are instruments.

The weather is the inner report: how the day went, what I noticed, what worries me. Keep writing it. A year from now it will tell you things nothing else can.

Instruments are the entries you can check. Think of an airplane cockpit. Whatever the weather is doing outside, the instruments give a more objective reading, and they keep the pilot oriented. Three are worth keeping. (For the everyday side of capture, see The Capture Habit.)

What actually happened

Attach a time or a number where you can. Not “worked on the proposal,” but what you did, for how long, and toward what. Write facts your future self can verify, rather than impressions your future self has to trust.

The decision and the reason

The reason is the part that disappears fastest, and it is the part you will want most in six months. When a decision turns out well or badly, you will not only want to know what you decided. You will want to know why, and what you were thinking at the time.

The commitment, in a form you can check

This is the one almost nobody writes. Compare two sentences:

• “I need to be better about delegation.”
• “Every delegated item has one owner and a finish line.”

There is no day on which you can hold the first sentence up to your week and answer yes or no. The second you can hold up to a single meeting and get an answer. That is a standard: one sentence, written on the day you make the commitment, specific enough to produce a verdict.

A direction you can see

Your direction probably exists. If you read posts like this one, you likely have goals written somewhere: a plan for the year, a quarterly note, a page in a notebook from a good thinking session last January.

The problem is not that the direction is missing. It is that it lives somewhere else. Think about where the pieces actually sit:

• The commitment is in an annual plan or a project note.
• The evidence is scattered across your calendar, your inbox, your bank account, and your task manager.
• The reflection is in your journal.

Three things, in at least three places, and they never end up in the same room at the same time. That is how a person stays busy, sincere, and well informed, and still drifts away from the finish line they set.

So pull the direction forward. Keep three to five live standards at the top of the note where you actually do your review. You do not need the whole plan there, only the few sentences that hold you accountable right now. When one is met, or stops mattering, replace it.

For me, that place is a home note in Obsidian. It holds the queries that bring up my notes from a week, a month, and a year ago every morning, and in the same note I keep links to my quarterly, annual, and long-term goals. Wherever you review, put the direction there, where you will see it every time.

A direction nobody looks at is just a wish. If you never consult the map, why mark the X?

There is research behind this. A large meta-analysis of randomized studies found that people who monitored their progress toward a goal more often were more likely to reach it, and that the effect was stronger when progress was written down rather than simply considered. That is not a claim about your journal in particular. It is a reason to prefer a record over an impression.

Where the two points meet

Now you have two points: the record behind you, and the bearing ahead. Put them side by side with three questions. It takes about a minute.

1. What did I say mattered here?
2. What did I actually do?
3. What has to change before the next decision?

Here is the delegation example, all the way through.

What did I say mattered? Every delegated item has one owner and a finish line. It is already written at the top of my note, so I do not have to remember it.

What did I actually do? I look at the evidence, which is the project itself. Three people are contributing, nobody is named as the closer, and there is no date and no criteria for finishing. Am I keeping the standard? Not yet.

What has to change? Before the next meeting on this project, I name one owner and one date. That is all. Not a resolution to become a better delegator, but one change, made before the next decision, while it still costs nothing.

That is the point of the review. It is not a score. It is a correction made early enough to matter.

Notice also what the three questions prevent. They keep the review from becoming a performance evaluation of your character. You are not asking whether you are a disciplined person. You are asking whether one commitment and one piece of evidence agree, and what to adjust if they do not.

A good quarterbacks coach does the same. He does not ask whether his quarterback is any good. He shows him that his footwork was off on this play, or that he skipped a progression, and that it led to this result. The correction is specific, and the goal stays where it was: score, win the game, win the championship. Your goals and your values hold still in the same way, and you make progress on them through small, specific course corrections.

When the bearing is wrong

There is an honest objection. What if the direction itself was wrong?

Sometimes it is. A standard that made sense in January can stop making sense once the year has taught you something. Then change it. If you set out for a city and learn that the event you meant to attend is not being held there, you change course. But change it deliberately, and in writing.

There are two ways to end up somewhere other than where you intended. You can decide to go somewhere else, or you can drift. Both move you. Only one of them is yours, and the only way to tell the difference later is that one of them was written down.

The same goes for a standard that is doing damage. If you are ashamed every time you look at a number, or you find yourself gaming it to hit the mark, or it counts something that stopped mattering, the problem is the measure. Fix it. A bad standard does not just fail to help. It aims your effort, more efficiently, in the wrong direction.

And not every commitment needs a number. When the thing you care most about resists counting, a sentence can govern a decision better than a dashboard. “My first work block advances the week’s main deliverable” is not measurable in any strict sense, and you will still know every morning whether you kept it.

Squared away

Squared away is a sailing phrase before it is a tidiness phrase. On the old square-rigged ships, the sails hung from yards, the long spars that cross the masts. When the ship turned onto a course with the wind behind her, the crew hauled the yards straight across the hull. They squared the yards, and the whole ship was set to run where she was headed.

From there the phrase came ashore. In the Navy and the Marine Corps it came to mean ready and in order, and only later did it come to mean tidy. But the original sense is the one worth keeping. It was never only about everything stowed neatly. It was about everything set for where the ship is actually going.

That is what the two points give your review. The record tells you where you have been. The direction tells you where you said you were going. A life is squared away when the two line up, and the daily review is where you check whether they do.

Square it away

Pick one commitment you are carrying right now. Just one.

Write it as a single checkable sentence at the top of tomorrow’s note, where your review will find it without any effort from you. Then let tomorrow’s review do the work it has been trying to do all along.

Source: Benjamin Harkin et al., “Does Monitoring Goal Progress Promote Goal Attainment? A Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence,” Psychological Bulletin 142, no. 2 (2016): 198–229.