Everyday Systems: Podcast : Episode 97
Microreflection
Back in the days when twitter was still called twitter, and not MechaHitler, and had character limits, and well, character, the larger phenomenon it pioneered was sometimes referred to as microblogging.
I have to admit, like pretty much all of social networking, I never really got the appeal of twitter. This is despite the fact that I joined early enough to get my first name as my twitter handle. It helps to have a weird name, but still, I’m not the only Reinhard in the world.
My lack of enthusiasm for the thing itself notwithstanding, I liked this term, “microblogging,” because it helped me understand and (from a distance) appreciate this baffling new medium. I could understand why someone might want to blog, so I could understand (a little) why someone might want to microblog.
Today I’d like to talk about something analogous to microblogging, except in the realm of things you write for yourself, privately, a sort of private microblogging, tweeting to yourself. There is already, believe it or not, a term: microjournaling, which is basically just writing super short diary entries. I’d actually never heard of this before I just looked it up. But apparently it’s a thing. Of sorts. At least somewhere.
But the thing I’d like to talk about today is slightly different, and not yet a thing at all, at least as far as I know. My term for it is microreflection. I’ve spoken about instances of this practice before in the context of other systems, and I’m hoping long-time listeners will recognize some of its many cameo appearances in previous episodes. But I haven’t yet used this term or drawn attention to it specifically. Today I’d like to put the spotlight on it.
Although it wasn’t the first place microreflection appeared, I’m going to start with the Lifelog spreadsheet, where it plays a significant role. When I first started keeping a Lifelog in 2016, I sometimes referred to it as a quantitative diary. I would say, it’s like keeping your diary in a spreadsheet, and with numbers instead of words. Every row in the spreadsheet, every entry, has a date, like in a diary, except the entries are then mostly numbers: for example, 0 or 1 for did I do a particular habit, or weight, or steps. And I still think quantitative diary is not a bad way to look at the Lifelog, mostly.
But the Lifelog is also, on a small scale, a very small scale, a micro scale, a qualitative diary. Because some of those columns are not numeric, but notes of some kind. Usually these notes are reflections on what the numbers in other columns mean, some context. For example, in my body tab, I have a column for diet notes and exercise notes. In my soul tab, I have mood notes to go with my mood score, on the spirits tab I have drink description and drink assessment columns, on my spider hunter tab I have descriptions as well as point tallies for my spider and bonus points.
These mini-diary entries are each just a few words, usually not even a complete sentence, sometimes heavily abbreviated and in compressed, cryptic language. Usually they are transcribed from something I’ve scribbled on the back of one of my daily personal punch cards in a specific spot for that specific kind of reflection, also a sort of cell, a handwritten cell.
Often their job is to provide context for the numbers, so I’ll be able to understand some anomaly or failure better. The idea is then I can start seeing patterns into the circumstances around when failures happen. But the notes can also be interesting in themselves. I’ve taken to calling these mini, daily, categorized reflections, whether a cell in a spreadsheet or a cell on my handwritten punch card, or both, or even other places, in other formats, as I’ll mention shortly, microreflections.
I’ll give a few specific examples of actual entries so you get what they are and then explain why I’ve found this a helpful practice, how I use it to support my various other habits, and why I think it’s a valuable practice in itself, even apart from its supporting role as quantitative data qualifier.
Here are some examples from my actual 2025 Lifelog (I’ll also stick some screenshots in the transcript). Don’t worry, I’ll keep these brief. I just want to give a distinct flavor.
From Sunday, January 12th in my “exercise notes” column:
“UP: VS but def face wash"
This means “very slight but definite golfer’s elbow pain while I was washing my face.” UP stands for uppy arm which is my term for golfer’s elbow. Washing my face (and combing my hair) are two canary-in-the-coalmine activities that give me early warning signals that my uppy arm may be acting up again and I might want to be careful with shovelglove. As I get older, I’m experiencing that injuries are an increasing danger and it’s very helpful to note them and possible precursors to injuries so I can avoid or minimize them and recover from them better when they inevitably happen.
From Friday, May 16, also in the “exercise notes” column:
# FF: still bad but better. Got new shoes.
FF is short for Fascist foot, which is my cutesy name for plantar fasciitis, which I have trouble pronouncing with confidence, hence the cutesy name, and also that painful SOB deserves a little mockery. In this instance, in this entry, I was curious whether the new shoes with better arch support would mark an improvement. And they do seem to have helped.
On Saturday June 4, from my “diet notes” column:
FLOG start, > 173 weekly avg
That means my average weight for the week crept over the 173 pound threshold I had set for making myself FLOG (keep a food log) until I got it under again. I then kept noting “FLOG” in this column until my average weight slid under again – just the fact that I was flogging, not the actual details of what I ate. The actual food logging I do on my daily punch cards and I do not transfer them to the lifelog. It’s too much work, writing them down once is painful enough, and I get enough benefit without it copying them over. On this occasion it only took a week to bring my average back under 173. Sometimes it takes several. My reward (and incentive) is that I get to stop doing it when the weekly average goes under the threshold again.
Surgical Flogging is a whole system in itself – I hope you’ll listen to the podcast episode I did on that a couple of years ago if you’re at all interested. It’s my first recommendation as a minimally obtrusive next step for anyone who is having trouble making vanilla No-S work for them.
I also explain NWS or Non-Weekend S-days in this “diet notes” column, just in case it’s not immediately obvious why I am taking them. It’s embarrassing, even if I’m the only one who’s ever going to see this, to write down a preposterous excuse for an S day and knowing that I’m on the hook to provide one here provides some helpful friction to keep me on track.
On to the soul tab.
On March 28, my mood note was: “Virtuoso TLAYSing, juggle. To NYC w. I”
TLAYS is short for “To-do Lists Are Your Salvation” my reminder to myself that when things get overwhelming there is utility as well as comfort in putting on blinkers and just plowing through my to-do list without worrying and unproductively freaking out about the bigger picture. Apparently I did it well that day, in a variety of categories, and managed to get from Cambridge to New York City with my son. There is also, I should note, a time for TLAYD (“To-do Lists Are Your Damnation”) when I need to remember that life isn’t just about ticking off tasks – but that day wasn’t one of them.
I’m not going to give examples from my spirits tab (where I track drinking and other psychopharmaceuticals) or cbt game aka spider hunter tab, because I think you get the idea at this point. I have similarly compact and cryptic microreflections there to explain and contextualize those numbers.
If a microreflection column, in any of these sheets, is associated with a scored column or columns, where I’m grading myself on something, I can develop a better sense of what the scores mean and become a better, more consistent grader over time. Like, what does a mood score of 2.5 mean? I can look over previous entries to get a sense of the range and get more and more consistent.
Sometimes if the same qualitative descriptions come up over and over again it’s a clue that I might want to consider something to quantify this. For example, for some longer term injuries I went from describing how much something hurt (“bad uppy arm today”) to scoring it in a new column. From 0-5, how badly does my uppy arm hurt today? Or my fascist foot? Or whatever recurring physical ailment I’m dealing with lately. Then, periodically, certainly every year when I create a new lifelog spreadsheet, I can reassess whether this deserves an entire column vs. something else and whether I should remove or replace it.
Even just eyeballing my notes, sometimes patterns and relationships jump out. But as AI keeps getting smarter, this is great food for AI-assisted analysis. So many numbers and categorized mini-reflections all tied to dates. Already, you can ask AI to look for terms associated with the highest or lowest mood scores. You can ask it to do a sentiment analysis of your mood notes and sanity check your mood score. Maybe in the future I won’t even need to keep a mood score, because the words plus AI sentiment analysis will be enough. God knows what you’ll be able to ask it in 10 years. But only if you’ve been diligently logging, quantitatively and qualitatively.
Microreflections are so small. They necessarily miss so much. But the alternative, for most of us, is nothing–or a once in a blue moon emotional vomit that isn’t at all representative and probably so embarrassing that the first time you ever look at it again you destroy it. I like to look at microreflection as a kind of sampling: taking a few experiential samples of my life every day, so looking back at least I have some sense as to what was going on. It’s not the whole story, but it’s some story, and over the long haul, a fairly representative story. These regularly collected scraps of evidence give a more realistic and balanced picture than the individually more extensive but sporadic gushings that are all we can usually manage when we attempt to keep a traditional, longer-form diary. I don’t want to knock longer-form reflection–I think it can be valuable too. And I have some related reflective systems that are a little less micro that I’ll talk about in future episodes. But microreflections, for me, are the baseline.
I consider my audiodidact input mumblings into my voice recorder as another form of microreflection. They too are very short, have a timestamp attached, can now too be easily transcribed and analyzed by AI. I have over 20 years of these now for my virtual shrink. I haven’t availed myself much yet much of this virtual shrink’s services, part of that is because it’s a little creepy, and part is because I figure I might as well wait a little longer for it to get even smarter before investing too much time with it.
Self-knowledge is only part of why microreflection is valuable. Even if my notes immediately disappeared, if my card were lost or ripped up, if my spreadsheet or mp3s got deleted, the reflective process itself is worth something. It forces me to think for a moment how to summarize what is happening to me, and to consider what is most important. That effort in itself is a good exercise. And I’m more likely to do it when the prompt is habitual, narrowly focused, and not much is required in terms of output.
The reason why I prefer the term microreflection over microjournaling, is that it emphasizes this reflective, self-examining aspect, that the effort, and not just the product, is the goal of the process. It’s a mindfulness type-thing. Somewhere on the mindfulness spectrum between meditation and contemplation comes reflection.
Another reason the process is valuable is on a practical, behavioral level: as a speed bump or disincentive for bad behaviors you will have to describe. I talked about this way back in my episode on negative tracking and some more in my more recent episode on surgical flogging. Tracking is painful. It takes work and the content of it can be embarrassing. You’re working painfully to produce pain. Use that double pain to keep you in line. I do this explicitly by making certain types of microreflections conditional: I only have to flog, for example, if my weight is over a certain threshold. I can stop when it’s under again. Good behavior means less tracking and less embarrassing tracking. I feel like the Gordon Gekko of self help whenever I say this, but shame is good. At least it can be, if used in the right way.
To summarize: microreflection is the habit of regularly noting with just a few words at a time, max a sentence or two, observations about how you are doing, usually in some specific category, often but not always associated with some quantitative metric you are also tracking. Each microreflection takes just seconds. You can record them using a spreadsheet, or a voice recorder, or a physical index card. The act of microreflection is as important as the record it produces.
Well, this has turned into a fairly macro episode for a micro subject. So I think I’ll stop here.
As I mentioned, I have some other reflective systems that I’d like to share at some point, that I’ve also been practicing for a few years, but I don’t want to hit you with too much reflection all at once, so I think I’ll space out those episodes with other stuff. I also want to get back into revisiting old systems as draft book chapters for an Everyday Systems compendium. So next time, I’m not sure what, but something, I’m not going to say unreflective, but not systematically reflective. Until then, thanks for listening.
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