“Am I proud of what I accomplished today?” is a forcing function to a more productive day.

It’s a better question than “What am I going to do today?”, which is what most productivity tools attempt to answer. (Including the one I am working on, by the way.)

Ben Hardy’s excellent book Be Your Future Self Now is a wonderful treatment on how to achieve goals by acting like the person you want to be. By changing our way of thinking, we can also change our way of being.

It’s good advice, and you should read the book.

BUT — there’s a big problem. There is simply no way to make an “ideal future state” concrete. We’re lying to ourselves when we attempt this.

We all know what a great day of work feels like, though.

Not only that, but we can literally feel changes in our body and our thought patterns now when thinking about how we felt last night or will feel tonight. If we’re within 24 hours, we can feel it.

So I’ve started asking myself this simple question in a journaling prompt: “Am I proud of what I accomplished today?”

If I’m aware I have to answer that question tonight, it fundamentally changes how I think about my decisions in the moment.

To-do lists are great. But they’re too stinkin’ long and neverending. You know it. I know it. We can stop pretending.

We know we should do less of what doesn’t matter and more of what does intuitively, but because the trade-off isn’t concrete, we have to use hacks like Eisenhower matrices, which we talk about more than use.

But you automatically (it’s our nature) give thought to the work accomplished during your day when it’s time to pillow your head.

Why not just do the things you wish you would say you had done?