Coaching practices for Daily Review Questions

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Daily Review Questions, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• When I sit down at night to look back on my day with God, I tend to jump straight to everything I did wrong
• When I sit down to review, all I do is read my notes over and over, and they feel familiar so I assume I know them
• Even after I’ve gone through all my lists there’s still this faint background hum that I’m forgetting something
• The second I sit down to look back on my day my mind goes straight to everything that went wrong, and the whole review curdles into beating myself up
• My days just blur past and I never actually stop to look at how I showed up

Practices that may help

1. The Daily Examen: Reviewing the Day
   The Examen is a short, structured evening review from the Ignatian tradition: you replay the day with gratitude and honest attention to where you felt drawn toward or away from your values, then carry one resolve into tomorrow. It is a centuries-old contemplative practice; its benefits are best described as mechanistically plausible and widely reported rather than established by controlled trials.
2. The GTD Weekly Review
   The GTD weekly review is a structured 1–2 hour practice recommended by David Allen in Getting Things Done: you clear your inboxes, review all active projects and next actions, update your lists, and regain what Allen calls "mind like water." Evidence that the full review improves outcomes is largely practitioner-reported; the underlying components — external capture systems, project-level reviews, and outcome clarification — are consistent with cognitive offloading and self-regulation research.
3. The Stoic Daily Review
   The Stoic daily review is a structured morning-and-evening self-examination practice — rooted in Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus — that trains attention on what is within your control, builds honest self-knowledge, and interrupts reactive patterns before they compound. Evidence is largely mechanistic and clinical; no randomized trials exist, but the underlying cognitive mechanisms align with modern research on self-monitoring and reflection.
4. The Pythagorean Evening Review
   The Pythagorean evening review is an ancient practice of structured nightly self-examination, reconstructed by Pierre Hadot and others from Pythagorean and Stoic sources. It involves reviewing the day in three questions — where you went wrong, what you succeeded at, what remains — and has been a foundational practice for self-development from antiquity through the Stoics and Montaigne to modern structured journaling.
5. The Morning Questions
   Marshall Goldsmith’s morning questions are a daily active question routine in which you score yourself each morning on whether you "did your best" to pursue specific values-based commitments the previous day. The practice reframes self-monitoring from passive measurement ("how did X go?") to active responsibility ("did I try?"), which research on active questions suggests produces greater engagement and honest self-assessment. The evidence base is practitioner-clinical; large-scale trials are limited.
6. Become aware of God’s presence and give thanks
   Open the review by pausing, settling, and naming specific gifts from the day.
   The Ignatian Examen: Five Movements of Daily Review
7. Reduce: convert main notes to questions in the cue column
   After the session, cover your notes and write a question in the cue column for each main idea.
   Cornell Note-Taking: A System for Learning, Not Just Recording
8. Do a mind sweep to surface anything the system hasn’t captured
   Before ending the review, spend 5 minutes writing down anything still bothering or nagging in your mind.
   The GTD Weekly Review
9. Begin with gratitude
   Start the review by recalling specific gifts and good moments of the day.
   The Daily Examen: Reviewing the Day
10. The three-point daily self-examination
    End each day by asking three questions Zengzi — Confucius’s disciple — prescribed: loyalty, trustworthiness, mastery.
    Confucian Self-Cultivation: The Mencius Approach

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