The Daily Highlight

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

The focus of the day or "Daily Highlight" is one of the best and quickest methods to direct our attention to what we truly want to achieve for the day.

It's very simple. You can grab a sticky note or a blank A4 sheet of paper or a notebook. Write on it: Daily highlight and below it write what your one main goal is for today. The highlight can be anything. From spending time with family, to clearing out the garage or sending that email that keeps you up at night. My partner and I often use it to write down something that will bring us a lot of satisfaction in the short term or benefit us in the long run. Depends on the day.

We each set our own, and one of the daily highlights was also to set the “New post” page of our newsletter as the home page on all devices and browsers. Many times, this alone prompted us to write and publish a post.

So, the daily highlight can be anything that answers the above question. It can be something that lasts only a few seconds, or it can last the whole day.

However, we must remember that writing down the daily highlight is a suggestion and not an action that we must necessarily complete by the end of the day. And we can only choose one highlight per day. It's meant to guide us towards what would make our day successful. And even if we don't start it, it doesn't matter at all. From our experience, we have completed our daily highlights on more than 95% of days, and in that moment, even the most lost day turned into a success and we were satisfied with it. Once we successfully complete it, we cross it out.

We often consider the daily highlight a success even if we just start it. As starting something is most often the hardest part. For example - reviewing papers -  we would consider it completed even if we just opened the paper drawer and looked at a few sheets of paper. The next day or evening, we would discard the note regardless, even if we didn't complete the highlight. This gives it a light-hearted feel, as it completely disappears the next day. If we want, we can write the same highlight the next day, if it's still important to us, or we can forget about it without guilt. And of course, we don't need to do it every day.

But if you try it once and write down something small that would really turn your bad day around, you'll quickly start using this method every time your day seems lost or every time you don't know what to spend your time on. The feeling when we improve our day with something small (like one sentence of an essay we need to do) is addictive, and soon you won't be able to let go of it