Planning your next steps is pretty crucial to being productive, but it’s only useful if those plans are well-founded. To be successful, you need to understand why previous attempts at similar tasks didn’t go as planned. Conducting a personal after-action review is one way to assess your work, but to really understand what went wrong and prepare for future attempts, you need to dig deep. Try the “Five Whys” technique to get to the heart of the matter.

First of all, you should know that this is another productivity protocol that comes from the famous Japanese factory system, like the 5S and 3M techniques. Basically, once you identify a problem, you are going to ask “Why?” five times, which will eventually reveal the real cause of the problem – and what you need to focus on to solve it.

Some variations of the technique require you to assemble a team to brainstorm before doing this, but if you're assessing a personal problem, that part is quite customizable. For example, your "team" could be the people who post about the problem on forums, or a group chat with your friends. If the problem is a household issue, chat with your family. This doesn't have to be super formal, but if the problem is work-related and you have coworkers who are involved, include them in the discussion.

Whether you consult a team or not, the real work begins when you define the problem. State it clearly and ideally write it down. Let’s say the problem is that you didn’t clean the dining room in time for dinner, forcing everyone to eat at the bar. Simplify that to, “I didn’t clean the dining room.”