Starting With Gratitude
What’s something I’m grateful for today?
This is the question at the top of my daily log. It’s the question I start with before kicking off the workday, answering emails and hopping on calls.
This is a relatively new addition to my workflow, but I suspect it will be an enduring one. It’s a simple practice that feels good and keeps me grounded. I am a product of so much more than myself — the things people have done for me, the things they've said, the examples they've set. I don’t want to lose sight of that.
There’s also some interesting research demonstrating how gratitude can actually make us more productive. In Emotional Success, David DeSteno makes the case that cultivating the social emotions of gratitude, compassion, and pride can help us build self-control. That self-control, in turn, helps us get more stuff done.
Journaling is at top of DeSteno’s list of suggestions. Specifically, he recommends reflecting on the little things you can be grateful for, like that person who let you merge in front of them on the highway. Otherwise, we fall into the trap of only expressing gratitude for the obvious, which doesn’t paint a full picture of what we should in fact be thankful for.
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In sessions with my coach, we typically start with gratitude. Who am I thankful for in that moment when we begin, and why? This simple reflection primes our session and sets the stage for more meaningful engagement.
A core tenet of three-dimensional productivity is identity. Part of what I like so much about gratitude is that, unless you are a true narcissist thankful only for yourself, it forces you to consider external forces and events. You have to spot things outside your control that not only happened, but also shaped you in some way, even if only to leave a minor imprint.
To use DeSteno's example, reflecting on how it made you feel when a driver let you merge could make you more likely to do the same for others, or perhaps to think about the reasons why were in such a hurry in the first place. That small act of kindness from another is a forcing function to be more aware of the decisions you make, and isn't that something to be truly thankful for?
Personal identities are of course, well, personal. But they aren't molded in a vacuum.
On the daily practice side, after answering the gratitude question, I write out my top three priorities for the day. My tasks are already sorted and prioritized in Todoist, but I’ve found that reviewing everything on the docket for the day and actually writing out the top three things I want to get done is a helpful way to orient myself. Then I ensure that I’m prepared for everything on my calendar for the day and that my inbox has been reviewed and reconciled.
The process, which only takes a few minutes, has been a constructive way to start the day with the right mentality and approach. No matter how the subsequent hours unfold, gratitude gets me in the right headspace.
Whether you use an Obsidian template like I do (shout out to the friends who not only tolerate me talking about these types of things, but who also share their templates and workflows in return), my question to you is the same: could you build in a simple morning practice of expressing gratitude?
p.s. I knew that I had read the article cited above at some point in the past, but I couldn't remember where. It's a perfect demonstration of the value of my custom system, which allowed me to search "grateful" in Obsidian and quickly find the highlights from that article that I took a while back.