In this episode of Sequence Over Strategy, Michelle Warner introduces a game-changing journaling exercise: What's Working, What's Not, and Why.
Are you unknowingly sabotaging your business by ignoring small but crucial patterns? In this episode of Sequence Over Strategy, Michelle Warner introduces a game-changing journaling exercise: What's Working, What's Not, and Why.
This simple yet powerful practice helps entrepreneurs spot small wins and red flags before they turn into major problems. By consistently tracking three things that worked, three that didn’t, and analyzing the patterns, business owners can make smarter, data-driven decisions. Over time, this habit prevents reactive choices and ensures strategies align with real, observed progress.
Check out the full episode at TheMichelleWarner.com
Hi, I'm Michelle Warner and I'm a business designer and strategist, and in the 15 years I've done this work, I've noticed the same trend everywhere. Business owners are falling into the trap of centering strategies first, and they need to be centering sequence, because the reality is the steps you take in your business and the order in which you take them is more important than how well you implement any single strategy.
So on this show, my goal is to fix that by helping you find and trust your own sequence of actions, rather than blindly following someone else's strategy.
Welcome to Sequence Over Strategy. And in every episode of this show, I tackle a real question that I am hearing from a real entrepreneur. But you know what, today I'm going to break those rules and I'm not going to answer a direct question, but instead I'm going to share with you a simple but wildly useful trick I call what's working, what's not, and why.
Now this is essentially a business journaling exercise that helps you catch small wins you might not otherwise notice, or red flags when they first appear, so that you can either double down on the former, you know, double down on what's working, or address the latter before it explodes into a crisis. I mean, talk about Sequence Over Strategy, right?
We want to catch the wins, we want to catch the good stuff, and we want to catch the bad stuff before it becomes an issue. That's a good sequence. And that's the game, right? I mean, oftentimes when businesses struggle, and I talk about this all the time when I'm talking about the business growth dials and being in and out of alignment, we struggle.
It's because the small things that have changed in our business over time, things that are so small, we don't notice them, or when we consciously make the change, we don't think it's going to impact anything. And then the changes that happen, we don't notice them until it's too late, either too late to take advantage of them or to course correct.
I've done this myself for years, this exercise, and I've also made the mistakes of not noticing this stuff for years.
So there's a reason why I think this is so powerful. And I just do this in a daily page in Notion where I kind of add my entries. So however you jot down any kind of quick notes for your business, this can be really, really simple.
This does not have to be anything that is complicated or over-engineered. And it's something that I encourage all of my one-on-one clients to take advantage of. And so I thought, it's time to share it with all of you. And I think about this as my business gratitude journal, and I think you'll see why as I get into it. So without further ado, let me tell you about it. But before I do, there's a little bit of a Trojan horse for you.
We're going to do a little change. I do want to add this quick disclaimer. The practice that I'm going to describe to you, my what's working, what's not, and why practice, it was handed down to me sometime around business school, and I've been practicing it forever.
I'm going to date myself, like we're talking over 20 years at this point. So this is not something that I invented. I want to be really clear about that. I don't want to take credit for inventing it.
It came from somewhere or from someone, but I'm telling you, I've Googled and Googled and I've not been able to find its origination point. So that means that it may be one of those practices that has simply been handed down over time, or it may have an inventor of sorts and a creator. And if that is the case and anyone knows who or what that person or organization is, please share with me because I'd want to give proper credit if there is credit that is due somewhere.
So I just wanted to put out that disclaimer. This is not some sort of thing that I have invented, but I've just found it wildly, wildly useful.
And the same way it was passed down to me, I want to pass it down to you. So with that caveat, let's get working.
And again, this is called the What's Working, What's Not, and Why Daily Journal. And to complete this journal, it is literally that simple. That is why this is just in a notion table for me, nothing that's overly fancy. I'm actually not a big journaler in real life.
I'm much more of a visualizer, so I don't have loads of journals around me. So I simply have a database and notion where I keep track of this. And what I keep track of is that each day at the end of my workday, I write down and I invite you to write down three things that worked that day, three things that didn't work that day, and what they might mean. That's as simple as it sounds.
Three things that worked, three things that didn't work, what each of those three things might mean. And yes, there's a method to my madness for the three good things and the three bad things each day.
Obviously, there are not going to be three wildly great or three wildly disastrous things that happen to you each day, or at least I hope there's not because that just sounds like an absolutely exhausting way to live life. But the point, if you remember, is to catch the tiny things that are happening that you wouldn't otherwise see.
So I do not care how mundane this is, and I don't care if it takes you a minute for the first couple of weeks to figure out three things that went well, and three things that didn't go so well. Because sometimes those can be hard things to answer.
I mean, hopefully you're working eight or fewer hours a day. That means that one of these things has to happen almost every hour that you're working.
But still, I'm going to ask you to please write these things down. And this, my friends, is why I call this a business gratitude journal. Because I always read and was always taught whenever I looked into gratitude journaling, if you can't think of anything to be grateful for in a single day, look at the obvious, right?
Be grateful you have a roof over your head. Be grateful you have breakfast, that you have heat, whatever is around you, be grateful for that. That your gratitude journal does not need to be full of all of these amazingly impactful things that happen to you each and every day.
Because the course of living is not that dramatic each and every day. The same way we don't want your business that dramatic each and every day. Part of getting the sequence right, part of doing these exercise is to flatten the roller coaster.
And when we flatten the roller coaster, the dramatics should also flatten. Yes, you're going to have hugely high days and hugely low days, but those should be few and far between. And they should not be overly surprising in nature when they arrive, right? And so we want to use this to start to build a bank of the mundane because it's in the mundane that we find the stuff we want to build on or the stuff that we want to catch.
So again, same thing applies here. Don't be dramatic.
Look for the little stuff that happens. Did you say a certain phrase in a call and it went over well, write that down. And I bring up this one as my first example because I do this all the time. Most of my marketing phrases have come from noticing these little moments in my day.
You probably hear me talk about relationship versus traffic marketing. You obviously hear me talk about sequence over strategy. You may have started hearing me talk about productively haunting people as part of your marketing. Well guess what? Those were all phrases that just came out of my mouth in a phone call at some point. And they were also phrases that got written down at the end of those days as something that went well. I was like, wow, that came out of my mouth. The person or the people in that room with me responded really well. I should remember that.
Now I should probably edit those further and figure out the most proper, perfect way to market them or to brand them. And that's an opportunity I still have in front of me. But the point is a lot of my marketing phrases and a lot of us really struggle to figure out like, oh, how am I going to describe what I do? What do I call that thing? This is one way to catch those, right?
When you say something and it comes out of your mouth and you realize that people respond to it well, that's one thing that went well that day. Write it down. Other examples.
Were you annoyed that you had a call at a certain time of day? Write that down. That counts as something that didn't go well.
Did someone react to something in a way that you didn't expect, either positively or negatively? Write that down as a good thing or a bad thing. Did a client have a breakthrough with the tool that you shared? You got it. Write it down.
And then once you've written down three things that worked well, three things that didn't work so well, jot down what each of those things might mean. And I'm going to repeat that because there's a really important word in that sentence. And that word is might. I asked you to write down what it might mean.
And why might is an important word is that, again, we are looking for tiny moments in this day. And so not everything has to mean something.
When I start asking you, oh, what did that mean? I don't want you to overthink this because it's quite possible that the vast majority of the things you end up writing down day after day after day mean nothing. But it's our way of catching the little stuff that does mean something. So that's why we say, what might it mean?
We're not going to yet assign it that it has to mean that thing, because as soon as we do that, number one, you're looking for more important things throughout the day and you're not able to find three wins and three things that didn't go that well because you're assigning too much meaning to everything. A
nd number two, you're assigning meaning that you don't yet know. So if you assign meaning in that moment, you don't yet know what it means. And so you're kind of giving yourself false information. So all you're asking yourself is with curiosity, hey, what might this mean? So we can go back in time to the first time that I said sequence over strategy in a call and somebody really responded to it.
What might that mean? What might I have written down? I should actually go back and look what I actually did write down that day.
But what I might have written down is, oh, wow, maybe that's a way to describe what I mean when I'm talking about making better decisions for your business. Because I can say making better decisions for your business, and that just sounds generic and whatever. And nobody knows really what that means or how to actually do it.
If I say sequence over strategy, which does represent making better decisions in your business, people can understand that. And that's something that people can remember where they just started throwing some strategies against the wall, hoping that they worked. And they can reflect on that and remember, oh, maybe that wasn't the best approach.
So that's something what might it mean? That would be the kind of thing that you might write down. Maybe this might mean I have found a way to describe something that I've been struggling to describe.
Or if you had a meeting at a time of day that annoyed you, it might say, maybe I really need to go into my calendar app and my scheduling app and X that time out, because I needed to do something better. Maybe it means that. I'm not going to commit to that right now.
I don't need to commit to big conclusions out of my three things. But maybe I should write that down, right? And write down what it may mean so that I can start building on that. And that's what we're looking for. We're looking for those tiny moments in each day. And so it's not that everything has to mean something.
Bunch of it won't mean anything. But some things are the tiny breadcrumbs that turn into big things. So I don't want you to feel like you need to draw these big conclusions and give yourselves, you know, 40 new projects to work on, because now every day for a week, you've written down what worked and what didn't work.
And now you've drawn these big meanings. And so you have to fix all of that. Just write down what it might mean and be done. We'll worry about the rest later.
So for a week, do that. Write down every day, three things that worked, three things that didn't work, what those things might mean.
And now when you get to Friday, if you've done that all five days, this is when we start finding some meaningful takeaways. And this is when the exercise starts to multiply on itself and get really helpful. Because now on Friday, you're going to have 15 entries on both the good and the bad side, right?
You've written down three things each day for five days. So we have 15 things that went well, what they might mean. We have 15 things that didn't go well, what those might mean. So on Friday, you review those. You review those 15 or those 30. And you pick out three of those that went well and three that didn't go well.
So if you have 15 things that went well, what three are actually standing out now, right? There's going to be a bunch of garbage in there. I already told you a bunch of it is going to end up meaning nothing.
But there's probably going to be three things that are really interesting to you. And those are going to be the three things that went well that week. Or it may even be that you rewrite one because it may be that you start to see a little pattern.
And so it may be that, hey, I saw this go well three days this week. So I'm going to kind of roll that up into one thing that went well. And isn't that interesting?
And then you're going to find three things that didn't go well that week that again, that stand out like this is the stuff that matters, right? I had to fill out my sheet.
So I, you know, kind of wrote down a bunch of stuff that ended up being the equivalent of I'm grateful for, you know, having a roof over my head.
But then what's the gratitude stuff that really jumps out, right? What's the equivalent of that stuff that isn't just the mundane stuff that you forced yourself to write down? Find three of those, find three that went well, three that didn't go so well. And then again, what might they mean?
Still not drawing any big conclusions, but we might be able to draw a little bit more of a conclusion or be more clear about what it meant at the end of the week.
And so now at the end of the week, you have your three roll ups, what went well, what didn't go well, but those aside, start of the next week, you're going to do the same thing every day, three things that went well, three things that didn't go well.
On Friday, you're going to roll it up. You're going to find of those 15 entries on either side, which three really matter? Or do you want to combine some of them and extrapolate three things that went well, three things that didn't go well, what might those meant from the week, right? From the week prior. Okay. Now we've done this for two weeks and we have two weeks summary items, right?
We have six entries now of bigger things that went well and that didn't go well. And you continue doing that for the month. And then at the end of the month, hopefully you can see where this is going now.
You take a look at those weekly summaries because now you have a list of 12 things that went well and 12 things that didn't go well over the course of each week of the month, right? So you have a bigger data points now. We have, you know, the daily minutiae that's been rolled up into kind of weekly summaries.
And now at the end of the month, we have four weekly summaries. And so what can you do there? Well, now you look at those entries in the weekly summaries, you know, 12 on either side, and you're going to say, which three of these matter, right?
Which three of these 12 wins actually mean something. Now that I can look over the course of the month, which ones of these, now I can start asking and I can start having a better answer to what might this mean. Because if I start having, seeing some patterns or one thing just keeps winning out, right?
The fact that I said sequence over strategy in that first week, it keeps popping up as one of the most important things, one of the biggest wins. Well guess what? Now at the end of the month, I'm starting to extrapolate what might this mean.
I can start to say, well, I think this means it's probably going to be a core of my brand. And I think this means I found a really key brand phrase. And the same thing on the negative side, what didn't go well this week?
Well, if we go to the example of you're always ornery, if you have an 11 a.m. call, and we've seen that pattern over the course of the month, stop taking 11 a.m. calls.
That sounds simplistic, but that may be one thing that you find. Or if we go back and look at some of the other examples and you find that you had exercises either in a group program or that you work with with clients and they weren't responding, they were responding in a surprising way that was kind of negative.
Well now if you start to have a pattern of that over the month, or that's the thing that sticks out, now you can extrapolate that, wow, I better address how I try to solve this problem with clients. I probably better find a new way to do it, right? Because over the course of the month, that really stood out as a major thing that wasn't going well.
So I'm not going to continue to let that spiral. That's something that I'm going to address now. And so it's really at the end of the month that you start looking to really assign meaning to these things. Or it might be at the end of a quarter, because by the way, this continues to multiply. Because if you do this every month, what happens at the end of the quarter? Now you have nine entries from your monthly summaries on each end, right?
At the end of each quarter, you're going to have nine monthly things that went well, nine monthly things that didn't go well. And wow, now that is information, right?
If you're picking from those, that's some really meaty data of what do you want to double down on or what do you need to reconsider? You can do the same thing twice a year. You can do the same thing annually. Now we're getting to a really high level of planning, right?
But that is how you kind of let this multiply and you let this ball start running for you so that you can find these tiny little trends that may have started on a Monday afternoon and now can multiply themselves over the course to really win a place in the monthly summary and for you to assign meaning to that and for you to build on that.
And that, my friends, is how you find those tiny breadcrumbs that you can build on. Because when you're not doing this, what ends up happening when you start to plan?
What ends up happening is that you end up using hindsight and you try to figure out what you learned in the last week or the last month or the last quarter. And that doesn't go so well because now you're assigning meaning with hindsight with a lot more information and your memory is just not that great. And so when you are taking the time to capture these each and every day, even again, if it seems silly in the moment when you're writing something down and you're thinking, gosh, this is not going to matter, that's giving you real information that you can use, again, to either double down on what's working or fix what's not working.
Instead of, we all know that feeling, like at the end of the year or the end of the quarter or whatever your planning process is, you sit down and you think, gosh, well, what worked well this year? What do I want to do more of? What do I want to do less of?
And when that's where you start your planning, that's when we have a sequence problem because, wow, you're working with bad information then because you're working with no information. So you're just sitting there thinking, huh, wonder what, you know, what worked, what do I want to do? And I'm being dramatic.
I know a lot of you do a better job than that, but that's essentially what's happening. If you sit down one day and start kind of reflecting on what happened, your memory is going to be faulty. And even if your memory is not faulty, you're just going to have not noticed a lot of this stuff if you don't force yourself to sit down every day and write down three things that went well, three things that didn't go well.
Because it's within the minutiae that you find the goods. And so we kind of dig through the minutiae and discard it quickly at the end of each week and don't worry about that anymore because we want the one diamond that's nestled in there. Right? And then we're just building on real data when it goes to the planning.
So again, fixing things before they need fixing, doubling down on things before it occurs for you to double down so that you get the advantage faster. And as a bonus, you're not planning from faulty data.
You're just continually planning from real data. And that is why I love this project. You just go from hoping you're remembering correctly to knowing the trends that you saw all along.
And that, my friends, is the what's working, what's not, and why business gratitude journal. I would invite you to give this a try because you might just be shocked what it brings up for you. And of course, I would love to hear about it.
If it does bring something up for you, that's surprising. And I don't expect to hear about that in the first day or two because we need a little multiplying effect. But give this a go.
Do this for a week. Do it for two weeks. Do it for a month.
And then tell me, hey, what did you find? What did you catch in time? And you're feeling so empowered now because you saw it in time.
Or what opportunities did you catch because you were worrying about each and every day that you didn't allow yourself to forget that one time during a phone call?
You said, sequence over strategy and everybody's eyes lit up. Right?
That's a win. It's a win to remember that at the end of the day because then you remember it at the end of the week and then you remember it at the end of the month. And before you know it, it's the name of your podcast and people really respond to that phrase.
These are the types of little wins that you find when you are paying attention in this way. So again, I encourage you, give it a try.
Let me know what happens and just start jotting it down wherever it is easy for you.
Don't make this a big thing that you have to engineer of how you're going to write this stuff down. Just start a little database, start a spreadsheet, this can easily be in a Google Drive spreadsheet. Just write down, start writing down three things that went well that day, three things that didn't go well.
What might they mean? On Friday, round all that up and pick three of the best ones from the week. End of the month, round it all up, the weekly summaries and pick three of the best ones from the month.
You will find some direction there.
As always, thank you for being here today. If this episode helped you, I'd be so grateful if you would share it with someone else.
It might also help because that just helps the algorithm get this out to people who need it. And if you'd love to review, that's going to help others find it too and I'd be so grateful if you would do that. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you for being here. You can always find me at themichellewarner.com and I can't wait to see you again in a few weeks.