Taking Back Control of Life: Reflective Journaling

To be honest, for a long time, I misunderstood what “productivity” really meant.

I used to think a productive person was someone whose calendar was filled with colorful blocks, someone who packed every hour of the day and then cleanly crossed off one task after another before bed. That exhausted sense of fullness used to be the only standard I had for measuring my own worth.

Then this March, my career went through a real shake-up. I was given the chance to take control of where my work was heading - the kind of “freedom” many people dream about.

But guess what?
When that freedom without any structure around it landed on me, my first reaction was not excitement. It was overwhelming anxiety.

No one was telling me what I needed to do today, and suddenly I did not know where to place my energy. In that sense of weightlessness, I realized my old way of charging forward on autopilot no longer worked.

Real productivity is knowing exactly what you are running for.

So about a month ago, I decided to try a small experiment called a “reflective journal.”

Put simply, I forced myself to set aside a little time every morning and every evening to talk to myself and write it down.

At first, the plan looked perfect. I would do a “morning reflection” right after waking up, then an “after-action review” after work. But honestly, I’m just a normal person, and I have to admit something: in just this one short month, I have already had countless mornings where I opened my eyes and screamed internally, “Forget it today. I do not want to write a single word.”

Sometimes it was because I had slept badly the night before and my brain felt like mush. Other times it was because I reached for my phone the moment I woke up and got instantly swallowed by all the flashy short-form videos on social media. Faced with a blank notebook, my brain immediately goes into defense mode and starts telling me “You are in terrible shape today. You are not going to write anything deep anyway, so just skip it.”

The old me would have reacted badly the moment the plan broke down. I would have felt awful about myself, and then the entire habit would have quietly died. But this time, I left myself a way out. I told myself I did not have to write both morning and night no matter what. If I truly could not get up in the morning, or if my mind was too messy, then I could let that go. As long as I filled in the review before bed, the day still counted as a pass.

Unexpectedly, that mindset of “allowing myself to be imperfect” became the very reason I was able to stick with it. Because the pressure was lower, the habit stumbled along and somehow made it through a whole month.

On the mornings when I really did manage to sit down, I only asked myself three very simple questions. What am I thinking right now? How am I feeling? And what is making me feel excited?

Those three questions became a kind of gentle scalpel.

Take the recent changes in my career, for example. For a while, I would wake up each morning with a heavy feeling in my chest, like there was a stone pressing down on it. If I ignored it, I probably would have carried that irritation with me into class and through the rest of the day. But once I started reflecting, I honestly wrote down the words “unease” and “anxiety.” I admitted that I was afraid my career would stall after the system changes, and that I was scared of the unknown challenges ahead.

And that honesty allowed me to think more deeply about what was hiding underneath those emotions. Something strange and beautiful happened after I answered the third question, “What is making me feel excited?”

Looking at the anxiety I had written in the first two lines, my pen paused for a moment. Then, almost as if it had a mind of its own, I wrote, “I can finally release my own ideas. I can loosen my grip and start testing the plans that have been circling in my head for so long. And I am excited to see just how far the future version of me can go.”

In that moment, it felt like I had awakened myself. Beneath that thick layer of anxiety, what had been hiding all along was an intense hunger for freedom. That small moment of awareness completely shifted the way I made decisions that day - instead of defending cautiously out of fear of failure, I started moving forward with anticipation.

At night, after the full exhaustion of the day had finally hit, I would begin the second half of the experiment. I would review what I had done that day, then choose one thing - purely by intuition - that felt the “most illuminating,” and think about what it had taught me.

Dozens of things happen in a single day, so how do I choose? Usually I pick the scene that keeps lingering in my mind. It is not always the biggest achievement. A lot of the time, it comes from something very small and ordinary.

A few days ago, one of my students told me about teaching a diabetes education session at an elementary school. Because she was facing a group of very young and difficult-to-manage children, it was a “first time” full of uncertainty and obstacles for her. But she put tremendous effort into preparing her teaching materials, and along the way, people around her kept stepping in to help her overcome one challenge after another. In the end, the event went smoothly.

That night, I wrote her story into my review. The insight I took from it was simple. “When you truly prepare for something with care, the people around you can feel it. They will be moved by your passion, and they will come help you.” That realization felt like a shot in the arm for me while I am in the middle of this career transition. It gently reminded me not to keep staring only at the difficulties in front of me. If I care deeply enough about this path, the resources and people I need will be drawn toward me naturally.

Beyond adjusting my mindset, the evening review also became a tool for “adjusting” the rhythm of my life.

As a coach, it is easy to fall into a blind habit of “if there is a class, take it; if there is money, earn it.” One day, I scheduled five classes in a row. By the time I got off work, it felt like my soul had been drained out of me. My brain had completely shut down, and even opening my mouth to speak felt hard.

If this had happened in the past, I probably would have just gone home, taken a shower, collapsed into bed, and repeated the same vicious cycle the next day while still telling myself I was working hard. But that night, I forced myself to record exactly how wrecked I felt mentally and physically. I wrote it down in very concrete terms. By the fourth class, my concentration had already dropped sharply. By the fifth, I honestly felt I could no longer give my students one hundred percent of the guidance they deserved. That was unfair to them, and it was also a kind of overdraw on my own body.

This was not complaining. It was a ticket I wrote for myself. In the “solution” column, I wrote, “My current limit is three classes in a row. Beyond that, teaching quality drops, and my long-term health suffers too.”

From that day on, it became a hard rule in how I schedule classes. Now, whenever I see three classes back-to-back on my calendar, I automatically block off the next hour. No matter who asks to book a session, I do not take it. I leave that space for myself to buffer and breathe. That is the most real power of reflection. You record yesterday’s painful experience and use it to make specific adjustments to your future actions. Repeated over time, that is what growth looks like.

This one-month experiment made me deeply feel that life will always find ways to knock us off course. There will always be mornings when we lose control and scroll on our phones, moments when anxiety makes it hard to breathe, and nights when we are completely drained.

But after all that chaos, if you are still willing to give yourself ten minutes, sit down, and honestly ask, “How do I feel today? What did I learn?”

Then in that very moment, you have already taken the steering wheel of your life back into your own hands.

And maybe that is what productivity really means to me now — not filling up every hour, but making sure each step is pointed in the right direction.

If you have been feeling busy lately but still have no idea what all that busyness is for, try this. Take out a sheet of paper and begin with the question, “What am I thinking right now?”

Find Coach Miles here