You don't have to invent your own reflection questions

You sit down to reflect on the day, and nothing comes.

You know roughly what you'd want to say, but the moment you try, it's gone. You ask yourself "so, how was today?" and get back "fine, I guess," and that's the end of it.

That's rarely a writing problem. It's a missing question.⁠

Without a question, reflection just circles

Close your eyes and try to "think about today" with nothing to aim at, and what surfaces is whatever is already bothering you. The thing that went badly. The remark someone made. Tomorrow's unpleasant meeting.

Psychology draws a line through this. Thinking about yourself splits into brooding — measuring yourself over and over against a standard you haven't met — and reflection, which moves toward understanding what happened. Brooding is the one that tracks with depression. One stays in place; the other goes somewhere.

A large part of what separates them is the question.

When you're running on "why is it like this" alone, there's nothing setting a direction. That's the circling.

Good questions come in an order

The single most useful idea for choosing a question is sequence.

If you've facilitated a workshop, you may already know ORID — the Focused Conversation Method from the Institute of Cultural Affairs. Four levels, in order: Objective, Reflective, Interpretive, Decisional. Facts, then feelings, then meaning-making, then action.

What we use is ORIMD, which is ORID with one level added: Meaning.

• Objective — What happened. What you saw, heard, did.
• Reflective — How it felt at the time.
• Interpretive — Why you think it went that way.
• Meaning — What it means for you.
• Decisional — So what do you do.

The addition isn't decoration. ORID was built for groups moving toward a decision together.⁠ When you're reflecting alone, there's a step that group facilitation can leave implicit and solo reflection can't: the difference between understanding why something happened and knowing what it means to you. Skip that, and you get an accurate analysis of an evening that changes nothing about how you live.

You don't need to memorize five words. Not skipping the order is what does the work.

Reflection goes shallow when it starts at Decisional. "Tomorrow I'll get up earlier." "Next time I'll say something." It looks like accountability, but with the facts and the feelings unexamined, the same situation tends to produce the same result.

Circling at the Objective and Reflective end is the brooding from earlier. Walk the whole way — entrance to exit — and things start to move.⁠

The question you need changes with the day

Having a catalogue doesn't help much at 11 p.m. Working from what kind of day it was narrows the field fast.

Here are questions you can use as they are. You don't need all of them — one or two is a full night's work.⁠

A day that went badly

• What happened today, in order, in about three lines
• Which feeling was strongest in the moment
• Looking back, where was the point it turned

Hold the verdict words — failed, blew it — until the facts are down. Mixed together, the facts end up looking smaller than they were.⁠

A day you feel unsettled

• If you had to name what you're feeling, what would you call it
• Where in your body is it
• If you could say one sentence to someone, what would it be

Not knowing why is fine. ⁠"I don't know why" is a complete entry — it's a record of the state you were actually in.

When one angle won't shift something, it's often because the frame is doing the work rather than the facts. On that, We See Different Landscapes is worth reading.

A day when nothing happened

• What took the most of your time today
• Where did your mood move even slightly
• Is there anything you'd rather not carry into tomorrow

"Nothing happened" often turns out to mean ⁠"nothing worth writing about."⁠ Lower the bar and something usually surfaces.

A day with a decision waiting

• What is this choice protecting
• Looking back from five years out, which would you want you to pick
• What information is still missing before you can decide

Passing through Meaning on the way to a decision keeps the choice from collapsing into pure cost-benefit.

A day when something went well

• Name three things that made it work
• Which of those did you do
• What would it take to reproduce it

Good days get waved through without examination. But a good day is the only kind you can turn into something repeatable.⁠

You don't have to invent them

Having listed all those questions, here's the part that matters most: you don't need to choose your own question every night.⁠

The practices that last decided what to write in advance. Questions work the same way — the more they're settled, the easier it is to keep going.⁠ Copying tonight's five into the margin of a planner is enough.

We build a reflection app called Reflection Cloud, and this is the part we took on.

• Open it in the morning and the questions are there: how you feel, why, what kind of day you want, what you want to get to. At night, questions that look back.
• On a day you want to go deeper, pick a theme and the questions arrive in ORIMD order.
• When you finish, the AI takes in what you wrote and responds briefly. It won't tell you what you should do — phrases like "you need to" and "you should" are ruled out by design, because pressure is the thing we're trying to remove.

Take away the work of choosing, and what's left is writing. The reason it didn't stick may have been sitting upstream of the writing entirely.⁠

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Research referenced

• Treynor, W., Gonzalez, R., & Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (2003). Rumination reconsidered: A psychometric analysis. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 27(3), 247–259. (The brooding/reflection distinction.)

This is research on self-focused thinking in general. It didn't test Reflection Cloud.