# Questions for better reflection > A new set of questions to act as prompts in my weeknotes, encouraging me to reflect on how my actions align with my values. > Last updated: 2023-01-04 ## Questions for better reflection I write weeknotes to record what I’ve done, and to reflect on my practice as a product manager. I’ve used a couple of formats over the years, but the headings in my weeknotes template don’t provoke reflection. Though I do reflect by actively remembering and writing down what I did, I want to be more intentional with my weeknotes. A new set of questions should act as prompts, encouraging me to reflect on how my actions align with my values, or help me move towards the place I want to be spiritually. ## Personal values After working at a startup and feeling like I wasn’t in the right place, that I wasn’t able to do work that fulfilled me, I made a move back to the public sector. At the time I told myself that working in public service aligns more closely with my personal values…but, to be honest, I didn’t _really_ know what those were. Sure, I knew that I wanted to do things for people, not profit. And I knew that workplaces with good psychological safety energised me. But I couldn’t easily nail down my values. So I turned elsewhere for some help. I read a few scholarly articles on personal values and there’s a popular framework developed by Shalom H. Schwartz that’s widely referenced. I found an online test that used the framework and answered its questions, to try and work out what my values might be. My strongest felt values were - hedonism - universalism - self-direction, and - benevolence Hedonism is about pleasure, enjoyment and having fun. Universalism is all about doing things for the benefit of other humans and nature. Self-direction is about creativity, freedom and choosing your own goals. Benevolence is about increasing the welfare of those around you. ## Coming up with the questions I’ve written and edited a set of questions which, I hope, will help me reflect on whether I’m living my values. I’ve also included questions to help me think about how I’m finding balance, inspired by reading Becky Hall’s _The Art of Enough_. If there’s no answer to one of these questions, it’s time to ask whether there was an opportunity to live that value in the week. Though I believe in growth, I also believe in limits and boundaries: you can’t push yourself endlessly, and we’re all subject to the chaos of the world. ‘To the mind which lets go and moves with the flow of change, emptiness becomes a kind of ecstasy.’ This comes from Zen Buddhism, another influence on my thinking and doing in the last two years. In _The Way of Zen_, Alan Watts talks about relying on ‘peripheral vision’ or intuition, so I added a question about that too. ## My weekly prompts The questions I’ve settled on as my weekly prompts are: - What did I do for the people and planet? - What did I appreciate? What was fun or made me happy? - What did I do for those around me? - What did I do for my well-being? What was ‘just enough’? - What happened through play or intuition? - What was hard or puzzling? - What did I learn? These questions will help me structure my reflections, pull the stories out of the work I did in the week, but they shouldn’t appear as headings in published weeknotes. I tried the headings in [S13E18](/2023/01/06/the-chocolate-cake/) but the weeknotes didn’t feel right, something I reflected on in [S14E01](/2023/01/15/the-unconference-2/). I’ll continue experimenting with these prompts and tweak things where needed. 4 January 2023 · [Working in the open](/tag/working-in-the-open) [Notes](/tag/notes) Related posts: [The Reflection](/2019/03/02/the-reflection/), [Why I write weeknotes](/2020/11/01/why-i-write-weeknotes/), [The Reshuffle](/2018/07/14/the-reshuffle/) 2 replies, 0 reposts, 5 likes