Coaching practices for Three Question Evening Review

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

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

• When I look back on my day it’s either all the ways I screwed up or a vague "it was fine"
• I reflect every night and have all these insights about what I’d do differently, but nothing ever actually changes
• Every time I review how I acted today I catch myself building a defense
• At night my mind either replays only what I screwed up until I can’t sleep, or it skates past the day entirely
• By the time night comes my whole day has blurred into one undifferentiated "fine" or "rough," and I couldn’t actually tell you what happened in it

Practices that may help

1. 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.
2. The three-question evening review
   Ask three questions before sleep: What did I do wrong? What did I succeed at? What could I have done better?
   The Pythagorean Evening Review
3. End every review with a single resolved next action
   The review is incomplete until you name one specific thing you will do differently tomorrow.
   The Pythagorean Evening Review
4. Seneca’s evening court — judge the day as an honest prosecutor
   Review the day as a fair judge would: what was the evidence, what was the verdict, what is the sentence?
   The Pythagorean Evening Review
5. 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.
6. The Pythagorean evening examination (Hadot’s version)
   Before sleep, review the day in three questions: Where did I go wrong? What did I succeed at? What remains undone?
   Pierre Hadot’s Spiritual Exercises
7. Replay the day with honest attention
   Walk back through the day’s events and notice them without rushing to judge.
   The Daily Examen: Reviewing the Day
8. Stoic journaling
   Write to examine your judgments — morning to set intentions, evening to review how you actually responded.
   Stoicism, as a Set of Practices
9. Evaluate your three outcomes at day’s end
   A brief end-of-day check against your three outcomes closes cognitive loops and reveals what planning adjustments to make tomorrow.
   The Rule of Three for Productivity, Made Practical
10. Close with a resolve for tomorrow
    End by choosing one concrete intention to carry into the next day.
    The Daily Examen: Reviewing the Day

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