Most of us go through our lives literally just running on a hamster wheel.
We wake up, we do the same things, we drive the same way to work, or eat the same meals, and we put things back in the same place.
And I'm always surprised at how much we don't stop to think about WHAT we are doing and WHY we are doing it. SHOULD we be doing it? COULD we do it a different way? Is there a different, smarter, more leveraged way we could be living our lives?
But most people just don't think like this. They are just on auto-pilot cruising through life.
Check In Regularly. At the end of days/weeks/months/years I do a very quick review and ask myself a few questions. What worked, what didn't? What can I do to get more leverage, to feel more aligned? The prompts help me think about what's important to me and doing it at regular intervals gives me a clear stopping point & breaks me out of auto-pilot.
Make a Hypothesis. Next, I come up with a hypothesis. Just like in year 7 science class - I ask myself if I tried a different course of action would that result a different outcome?
Create An Experiment. Once I have a hypothesis I start an experiment. Usually, I set a 30-day period to try out a new way of doing something. When the time period is over I can decide whether I'll continue with the new way or try something else.
This works both for really important life things (like moving house which I've done recently) and also for really trivial things (like how I do my laundry).