My Daily 3-3-3 x 3 Journaling Practice

Inspired by The Curiosity Chronicle, and by Heroic. This journaling practice has been a great tool for me. It take about 5-10 minutes from my morning. I write down my day's 3-3-3 x3 on an index card, to focus myself. Here's an overview:

3-3-3: Tasks

What's something you'll focus on for 3 hours today in deep work?
What are 3 shorter tasks you've been avoiding?
What are 3 maintenance tasks you should do keep-up work on today? Or 3 items fixed in your schedule like regular meetings.

This part was inspired by Sahil Bloom's Curiosity Chronicle, in this post The 3-3-3 Method, Personal Productivity, & More. Sahil tells us: 

"This is a strategy for structuring your day from my friend Oliver Burkeman, whose best-selling book, Four Thousand Weeks, was one of my favorite non-fiction reads of the last few years.

The 3-3-3 Method is as follows:

- Spend 3 hours on your most important thing.
- Complete 3 shorter tasks you've been avoiding.
- Work on 3 maintenance activities to keep life in order.

The idea is that if you execute and check off these three major boxes, you've had a good day. It removes the pressure of "never enough" thinking whereby ambitious people get into bed at the end of the day and feel the stress and anxiety of saying they could have done more."

I started doing the productivity portion as part of my daily routine, and I loved it. 

3-3-3: Character

                                   Energy        Work          Love
Identities                     x                    x               x
Virtues                         x                    x               x
Behaviors                    x                    x               x 

As I leaned more into personal development, I joined Heroic and began another daily journal practice. Heroic calls it your "big 3 x 2". You draw a 3x3 matrix with columns of energy, work, and love. Your rows are identities, virtues, and behaviors. You write down how you intend to show up that day and what you'll do to live virtuously. Check out this 90 second video for an overview. Basically, you bring intentionality to who you want to become, and how you want to show up. It helps to get really clear on what's important. For example, I want to show up as a perpetual motion machine, with equanimity, and run 5km. I want to show up as an engineering wizard, with curiosity, and read. I want to show up as husband & father of the year, be joyful and connected, and set aside time with my phone out of sight, and out of touch to be present with my loved ones. Getting clear on this has enhanced my quality of life a lot! I waste less time and energy on things that are not priorities aligned with those goals.

3-3-3: Prosperity

Gratitude 123: What are 3 things I'm grateful for right now?
Hero bars: What are 3 things I'm proud of?
Hope 123: List WIN for WIGS: Day, Week, Month 

This is something I made up, because I wanted it to be 3-3-3 x 3. I landed on prosperity. Did you know the etymology of the word prosper means "to go forward with hope?" My intention was to get a boost to gratitude, hope, and big picture goals. This is an attempt to prosper (both mentally and financially).

In Thanks!, Robert Emmons points to a study which shows keeping a gratitude journal of just 5 things you're grateful for once per week for 10 weeks, leads to 25% higher feelings of happiness, and “participants in the gratitude condition felt more joyful, enthusiastic, interested, attentive, energetic, excited, determined, and strong than those in the hassles condition.” Good reason to keep a gratitude journal. I decided to go with 3 things daily rather than 5 things weekly to suit my 3-3-3 theme.

One of the Heroic tools is called hero bars. You point to things you're proud of. Things you paid for with blood, sweat and tears. Things that took grit and challenged you. Things you weren't sure you could do. Use these as your 'breakfast of champions', as fuel for the day. 

Another one I've taken from Heroic is WIGS (wildly important goals). Things that Napoleon Hill would describe as a 'burning desire'. Things you want to achieve. Then consider your next steps toward those goals. What steps can you make on a day-scale, week-scale, and month-scale to accomplish those WIGS? That's what we call WIN (or what's important now). In No Limits by Olympic champion Michael Phelps, he says

“One thing that separates Michael from other swimmers, Bob likes to say, is that if they don’t feel good they don’t swim good.
That’s not the way it is for Michael.
Michael, he says, performs no matter what he’s feeling. He has practiced it for a long time. He knows exactly what he wants to get done, and he’s able to compartmentalize what’s important.
Bob, with his seemingly endless collection of sayings, naturally has an acronym to describe the mental aspect to my racing. It’s ‘W.I.N.’: What’s Important Now?’
It’s true. When it comes down to it, when the time comes to focus and be mentally prepared, I can do whatever it takes to get there, in any situation.”

So, write down what's important now as part of the 3-3-3. What are the next important steps to get closer to your goals.

Finally, you can tie together your hero bars and your WIGs by doing some quick affirmations. They take the form "If I can [hero bar], and I [behaviors in my big 3x2], then I know I can [WIG]".  For example, "If I can enter unknown territory by moving to Florida, and I am willing to act with courage in the presence of fear, and I'm joyful, connected and encouraging, then I know I can support my wife and kids as we transition to home-schooling".

I hope you find this framework as useful as I have. My 3-3-3 x3 journaling protocol. What about you? Are you journaling? What do you write?