Daily highlight - daily win for a life well lived

I often find that time passes me by.

There are things I want to do, but for some reason I don't. Either I feel like they're not important enough, maybe they're overwhelming and sometimes they can simply be boring. Whatever the reason, a lot of time is lost, because I don't make the decision to do a thing.

What I've found helpful in the past, and that has once again come to the top of my mind is a Daily highlight. It's a question you ask yourself at the start of the day, to choose one thing that would make the day a victory.

Here are three versions of a focusing question:

If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day?

We got this version of the question from Tim Ferriss and is the one we like to use most.

But here are two more, if they happen to resonate more with you.

What's the one thing I can do, such that by doing it, everything else becomes easier or unnecessary? Taken from the book The One Thing by Gary Keller

What do I want to be the highlight of my day? from Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky.

The thing all three have in common is they make you choose one and only one thing. A priority, the thing that is regarded as more important than others. Not priorities. Just one.

It's often scary to choose just one thing. There's so much to do. I couldn't possibly only do one thing.

To help with that fear, a useful exercise, that I wish I would do more often, is this:

Think back one month and imagine you completed a daily highlight each day. Would you feel like you've made progress? Would you be further along now by only doing one important thing, than where you actually are now. For me the answer is a very clear Yes.

Small wins add up fast. We just need to have faith that one thing can be enough, if we're consistent.

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

Life is long. If we manage to turn each day into a small win, this long life can turn into something truly great.