Ask many of us what we did last week and we will tell you, mostly, what we intended to do. The two have a way of merging in memory. The run we planned becomes a run we half-remember taking. The plan we keep meaning to start sits in the mind as good as begun. The evening we set aside for our children, then gave to the inbox, files itself under time spent with the family. We are not lying. We are doing what everyone does, which is to remember the intention and quietly credit ourselves with the execution.
There is a simple way to interrupt this, and it costs nothing but a month of honesty. Keep two lists. On one, write what you say you are going to do, each day, in advance. On the other, at the end of the day, write what you actually did. Keep them side by side. Do not edit the first list to match the second when the second disappoints you. At the end of the month, read the two columns together.
The gap between them is the truer portrait. It is drawn from evidence rather than intention. Intention flatters; evidence does not.
The Forecaster Nobody Audits
We each run a private forecast of ourselves. We predict, constantly, what we will do: this year we will get fit, this quarter we will fix the business, this weekend we will deal with the thing we have been avoiding. The forecast is confident and it is rarely checked against the result. We simply issue a new one.
A weather service that never compared its forecasts to the actual weather would drift further from reality every year, growing more confident and less accurate at the same time. Most of us are exactly this service. We forecast our own behaviour daily and audit it never. The two-list review is the audit. It puts the prediction and the outcome on the same page, where the difference cannot be talked away.
What tends to surface is not flattering, and it is not meant to be. The task listed on Monday is still being listed on Friday, copied forward four times, treated each morning as a fresh intention rather than a four-day-old failure. We discover that the work we believe fills our days takes a couple of real hours, and that the rest goes somewhere we cannot account for. We discover that the things we say matter most appear on the first list often and on the second list rarely.
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