I've finally come around to reading The hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz. As I read more books, I've been making a conscious effort to apply to my own life some of the things I learn from reading books.

And today, I came across Ben's attempt at asking himself and his senior leadership, what they are not doing. While it is common for people and for teams to focus on and think about what they are doing and how they can do it better, not many pay attention to what they are not doing. And often, therein lies a thing or two that they really ought to be doing.

This is similar to the principle of consciously saying no to good opportunities that come our way because we are committed to focusing our energy and time on other things and committing to even more will detract from that. Which also requires an awareness of what we are not doing (or at least, what we ought not to be doing).

So, I decided to ask myself that question today.

What am I not doing?

And I came up with a few things. Some of these, I hadn't consciously chosen to not do. They had just fallen to the wayside as I had gotten busy with other things.

Grounding ourselves with this awareness once in a while might turn out useful, like it did for Ben.