I was listening to a stoic lesson on Waking up. It was about:
Focus on being a participant in your life during the day.
But in a low-grade manner observe yourself during the day.
Play the role of your own critic in the evening (e.g. do a bedtime reflection).
I've been doing a daily reflection for a long time. Though I have not thought about the reflection as providing constructive criticism. This framing seems much better than my previous one. Before I mainly wrote down all the things that I did during the day, and how they differed from my plan for the day. This is not bad, insofar as it helps you to make improvements to your life. I do think there is some merit in just doing this, but the main benefit is, that it makes it easier to think about concrete plans for improvement. I understand constructive criticism as either providing information that is relevant to come up with plans for improving yourself, or with suggestions for such plans.
Also, this framing makes it more evident that the goal is on improving yourself. Overeating, behaving differently from how I think I should act in some social circumstances, not going to bed on time, or eating unhealthy food, are more obvious to think about. The objective is to come up with plans for improving yourself. Before it felt more like I was following a rigid procedure of describing my day.
Look for things that were not good for 3 minutes, and then come up with a solution to the most important problem.
This seems to be by far the best plan. You can't train many new habits at the same time. Instead, you should focus on 1-3, until you got them down. Habits are involved in many improvement plans if not all. Most improvements are about training yourself to do the right thing reflexively.
Also, reflecting and coming up with plans can take quite a lot of time. Before having the framing of giving myself constructive criticism, I... (read more)