Minimal Reflection Cycle

We’ve all found ourselves trapped in a daily loop, repeating the same patterns with the frustrating feeling of achieving no visible results. This discouragement and the belief that "there’s nothing I can do to fix it" prevent us from escaping that cycle.

This feeling is nothing new. The myth of Sisyphus dates back to classical Greece, demonstrating that the human experience of routine frustration was well known: Sisyphus was condemned to push an enormous boulder from the base of a mountain to its summit, only to watch it roll back down to the valley every time he almost reached the top. Effort without hope.

Our day-to-day can feel like a similar punishment, where we tirelessly move tickets across the backlog, but the workload never seems to diminish, and the strategic outcome is invisible. Deeply entrenched in the problem, we lack the necessary perspective to introduce solutions—we simply continue surviving. When we take the chance to do a retrospective in this state, we are only able to describe our frustration, adding a new circle of complaints: "nothing moves forward," "stakeholders constantly bring new requirements," "tickets lack clear definitions of done," etc.

But this isn't the way forward. As the philosopher John Dewey said, the key is the quality of processing, not the quantity of time invested:

"We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience."

Intuition tells us that years in a role should increase our knowledge, but reality proves otherwise: we find people who, despite the time spent, remain stuck in a junior role, while others quickly progress to senior levels. It's not about how long you've done something, but how much you've learned and improved by doing it.

To generate that learning, we need the active process of reflection on action. Donald Schön in The Reflective Practitioner identified two types of thought: reflection in action (immediate adjustments) and reflection on action (the subsequent analysis). I will focus on this second point, explaining a practice I've named the Minimal Reflection Cycle (MRC), which I am using to force learning.

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect." - Anaïs Nin

I have always taken notes, logging everything that happens: decisions, tasks, incidents, and even how I feel. My problem, and that of many, was managing those notes afterward. While Getting Things Done (GTD) practices helped me centralize the information, the weekly planning process felt fragile. If I missed a key detail or skipped my weekly session, the effort to get back on track was too high.

The issue was that the planning cycle was too long. I decided to take GTD to the extreme, making the planning cycles as short as possible: daily.

I adopted the practice of journaling to capture everything in one place. The major shift was delegating the note processing work. Manually dedicating time every day to this task would be too time-consuming without help. Now, it's viable thanks to Artificial Intelligence.

With an AI assistant like Gemini, I can instantly request summaries and action suggestions from my daily notes. This means I only have to review, refine, and reflect without spending several minutes rereading and synthesizing. In just five to ten minutes, I can set up an action plan for the next day, and if I miss a day, the effort to resume the routine is minimal.

By eliminating the boilerplate of recalling what you’ve done, you can focus on reflecting on what you can change. This simple habit not only helps you plan tomorrow, but it automatically generates an invaluable knowledge archive.

What other uses could you give your log, now that you no longer have to spend hours processing it for a retrospective or a promotion review?

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