Productivity Tips #6: Gratitude Diary

We don’t see the world as it is, we see it according to the lens that we apply. That lens is affected by the mood we are in, and by what we are looking for. In the typical day we see only a small fraction of what appears before us. It has to be that way: even though our brains are incredibly sophisticated, they can’t process everything that we see. We discriminate the images that appear, we decide what we will notice and then we apply another filter to make sense of it.

So, if we can use a simple technique that helps us to focus on things that improve our view of reality, that must surely be a good thing. This is where the Gratitude Diary is valuable.

This exercise takes just a few minutes each day. Try it for 30 days and make sure you capture the results in a notebook. This makes it possible to review and check through the outputs. Doing it in the morning, perhaps as part of the Morning Practice that I wrote about in the previous tip, means that we set ourselves up well for the day.

There are five simple questions to respond to. Here they are:

1. What 3 great things did I do yesterday? 
2. How could I have made yesterday better?
3. What am I grateful for?
4. What 3 actions would make today great?
5. What kind of person do I want to be today?

At the end of 30 days you will have 90 great things that you did, and at least 30 things that you are grateful for. It’s a great way to avoid the victim thinking that happens when something goes wrong and we catch ourselves saying “uh oh, this is going to be a bad day”. There is no such thing as a bad day, that is just a way that our mind constructs the reality that we are observing.

The final question of the five is really important to address as it sets the tone for the day. Do I want to be generous, patient, kind, compassionate, warm or friendly?

You can vary the questions to suit your needs. The important thing is the emphasis of the questions is positive. Even if we are having challenging times, this exercise helps us to see the positive things around us, and gives us the resilience to push on through.