How long should a daily reflection take?

2–5 minutes is the target. Longer reflections are fine but shouldn't be expected — consistency matters more than depth. A brief note every day outperforms a thorough review once a week.

Is my reflection text private?

Yes. All reflection data is private to your account, protected by Row Level Security in the database. It's never shared or analyzed externally.

Can I search or browse past reflections?

The weekly rollup surfaces the last 7 days of reflections. Full search and longer-term history browsing is planned for a future release.

What if I don't have anything meaningful to write?

That's signal too. A day where nothing comes to mind might mean you were fully present and need no further processing, or it might mean the day was unfocused. Both are useful to notice.

Close your workday with a daily reflection that actually sticks

today's daily reflection prompt helps you review what you planned vs. what you did, name what mattered, and shut down your workday with intention.

Why daily reflection improves performance

A 2014 study by Di Stefano et al. at HBS found that workers who spent 15 minutes reflecting on their work at the end of each day performed 23% better on a learning task after 10 days than those who didn't reflect. The mechanism is straightforward: reflection converts experience into learning. Without it, days blur together and mistakes repeat. With it, even small daily observations compound into meaningful performance improvements over months. today provides a reflection field at the end of each day — not a structured questionnaire with five prompts, but a single open text area. The structure comes from the context: you're looking at your blocks, your session count, your commitment status. That data frames the reflection.

The shutdown ritual: why closing your workday matters

Cal Newport popularized the 'shutdown ritual' as a deliberate end to the workday — a sequence that tells your brain work is done. Without a shutdown, the mental rehearsal of unfinished tasks continues well into the evening, reducing rest quality and making the next morning start from a place of low energy. Reflection is the core of a shutdown ritual: you review the day, note what's unfinished, and formally close the loop. today's reflection card is designed to be the last thing you do before closing the browser. The act of filling it in — even briefly — signals completion in a way that simply closing Slack doesn't.

What to write in a daily reflection

Effective daily reflections don't need to be long. Three things cover most of the useful ground: what you actually completed (vs. what you planned), one thing that went well and why, and one thing you'd do differently tomorrow. The last item is the highest-leverage — it transforms yesterday's friction into tomorrow's improvement. today's reflection field is intentionally unstructured: you write what matters, not what a form instructs. Users who build the habit often settle into a personal format — a few sentences, a small list — that feels natural rather than obligatory.

Reflection data and the weekly review

Reflections accumulate. In today's weekly rollup, you can scroll through the last seven reflection entries alongside the day's stats — planned vs. actual minutes, commitment streaks, friction patterns. This is where single-day observations become weekly insights. You might notice that your Tuesday reflections are consistently more positive than Mondays, or that weeks where you logged friction as 'meetings' also had lower session completion rates. The weekly view doesn't analyze this for you — it shows you the raw data and lets you draw your own conclusions. The most useful productivity systems are the ones you trust, and trust comes from transparent data.

Frequently asked questions