Journaling is a powerful practice for self-reflection and leveraging on your experience. You should include in your periodical writing what you have learned during the day or recently. The prompt is very easy: “What have you learned today?” 

The exercise of going back with your memory to the experience you just lived is important because it reinforces what you have done and allows you to extract the best information. It will become the knowledge you want to synthesize, strengthen, summarize, and store. You can learn with it. You can leverage it.

The best way to reflect on your recent learnings is to take from 15 minutes to half an hour to record your experience. You could voice-record it. It would be more flowing. It’s just a story you are telling about yourself and the experience you had. Or you could write it down quickly and straightforwardly.

You should highlight the things you’ve noticed:

• What surprised you?
• And then, what did you do about it?
• What happened in a concise way so that you can summarize the events?
• And what happened that you want to remember and connect with things that already happened in the past?
• Or what do you need to remember next time that you will face something similar?
• Is there a process that you want to grab or of pattern about your approach or behavior?
• Is there a specific tool that was particularly useful?
• Or is there anything new that you discovered about new tools, new techniques, new methods, unique names, or new people?

Collecting your set of questions to query yourself and your memory about it, you get the most value out of your daily life. You will have the possibility of extracting further knowledge or ideas, maybe through abstraction, for instance, or connection. You will get ideas to write about, teach about, or share, or perhaps experiment next time you will face a similar situation.

If you want to become a better learner and give a higher value to your experiences, keep track of what you have learned daily.