So much of the popular advice about productivity at work focuses on efficiency and extracting maximum productivity from each hour.
That’s ‘doing’.
Reflection is thinking about doing, so that we can learn from our experience. Reflection helps us on a number of levels:
- Understanding the root causes of mistakes
- Learning from how we’ve navigated difficulties
- Making the connection between our skills and our results
- Understanding our role in interdependence with others
- Reconnection with what matters most to us in life
- Noticing the impact of small changes in our behaviour
- Avoiding repetition of mistakes or unhelpful responses
When we reflect, we intentionally reach into our past experience, evaluate our performance, and take any insights and apply them in our future behaviour. So it’s not just revisiting mistakes to relive them. Or wondering what might have been. It’s looking to learn from our past to help our future selves.


