10Q: Reflect. React. Renew.

Question Everything

Do you remember what you were thinking about last year around the High Holidays? Have you made good on your resolutions from years past?

A project called 10Q offers a new way to stay accountable. It invites you to answer a different thought-provoking question every day from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur. The questions are open-ended, so you can take them in all sorts of directions–for instance, “Describe one thing you’d like to achieve by this time next year,” or “How would you like to improve yourself, your life, next year?”

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Looking back at our selves and asking forgiveness for those we have wronged over the past year is undertaken in the “ten days of repentence” between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

One of my favorite ways to look back at the past year is with 10Q whose slogan is: Reflect. React. Renew. Life’s Biggest Questions. Answered By You.

Rereading my 10Q answers from last year and answering the first question, of 2011 I see that my focus has shifted completely. A year ago I was searching for something–a purpose. Wanting more from my life, I decided to go back to school to study nutrition (or medicine). I wanted my life to be slightly different than it was.

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10Q is a website that sends you a question once a day for 10 days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. You answer the questions online, and can choose whether or not to share your answers.

The site stores your answers each year, so you can look back at your responses from each year, to see how you have grown and changed over time.

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10Q Project Returns for the High Holidays

For the fourth consecutive year, the 10Q Project, which asks Jews a series of reflective questions during the Days of Awe, is set to go online. Sponsored by the Jewish nonprofit Reboot, the 10Q Project begins Wednesday, Sept. 28 and runs through Oct. 7.

Participants in the project are emailed a question a day over the 10 days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. At the end of that period, answers to questions about life, future goals, relationships and more are sent into a digital vault. The next year, answers are returned to participants so they can gauge their progress.

In years past, questions probed participants’ family encounters, regrets from the previous year and predictions for the year to come. For the 10Q Project this year, the first of the  10 questions will be sent out to  those who sign up by Sept. 27 at  www.doyou10Q.com.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could answer 10 questions about yourself, hide them in a vault on the web and then have them sent back for your review 365 days later? Sounds like something out of a Harry Potter novel. It is the website 10Q. 10 days to answer 10 of life’s biggest questions. Inspired by the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur, where we take stock of our past year and figure out where we screwed up and what we want to work on, 10Q offers an opportunity for everyone to take an online inner inventory with free storage included.

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Social Network for One: Website Offers Visitors Chance to Reflect

A website called 10Q wants you to share a bit of yourself. Before you raise your arms and scream “not another social network,” hear this one out. The intended audience is not the Twitterverse, nor is it Facebook’s 800 million users. The intended audience is you… a year from now.

Starting today and running for the next nine days, 10Q is inviting people to its website to answer a question. Ten days, ten different questions. What kind of questions? It could be something like, “Describe a significant experience that has happened in the past year.” Or “Is there something that you wish you had done differently this past year?” Or even “How would you like to improve yourself and your life next year.” In short, questions that you can’t really answer in a tweet.

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In an era where most reflection happens publicly in 140 characters or less, the 10Q project provides a private, deeper online forum for personal reflection beyond the waffles you had for breakfast.

Timed to coincide with the Jewish New Year, traditionally a time of introspection and self-reflection, 10Q is a unique project that, started today, will email participants of all backgrounds a question a day about the year that’s past and the year to come. After the 10-day period, the answers are sent into a digital vault. A year later, the answers are returned to participants and the process begins again.

“Thanks to new technologies like texting and Twitter, people have more opportunities than ever to express themselves, but fewer than ever to express themselves well,” said 10Q co-founder Ben Greenman, a New Yorker editor. “What 10Q wants people to do is what people should want to do for themselves — to reflect on life without worrying about status updates.”

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10Q Project: Answer life’s big questions online … Then reread next year

It might seem odd that 10Q, a project bent on promoting deep personal reflection and penetrating spiritual insight, would engage Joel Stein, a somewhat nihilistic humor columnist, as one of its endorsers.

“I find it hard to believe that anyone in our present society needs to spend any more time thinking about themselves,” said Stein, who writes for Time magazine, about the 10-day online journal exercise that is taking place this year between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, asking participants to answer “life’s big questions.”

“All I do is write about myself — maybe that’s why I’m less interested,” Stein said.

The 10Q project was conceived and organized through Reboot, a countercultural network of artists and innovators, and is, in its essence, an online version of cheshbon ha-nefesh, the ritual “accounting of the soul,” that Jews undergo each year during the 10 days of repentance. This iteration, however, is organized around 10 major questions, the answers to which are submitted electronically, then are secured in an online vault for one year, to be returned to participants on the eve of the following High Holy Days. It is also, the organizers say, designed for a universal audience (Reboot strangely employs the term “ecumenical”). To that end, Reboot has been promoting the project through bicoastal events and, yes, even celebrity Tweets, promising to deepen High Holy Days reflection beyond 140 characters, the Twitter limit.

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Let’s Play 10 Questions

Would you like to talk to your past self and compare notes on how your life is shaping up, be reminded of your goals, take stock in your blessings?

The world often moves too quickly for reflection, and the responsibilities of the everyday can keep us from life’s larger questions. This week, Reboot (the group behind the National Day of Unplugging) wants us to reconnect to self-reflection with a free online program called 10Q.

Starting tomorrow, September 28, people who sign up for 10Q will receive one question a day for 10 days. After participants answer the questions, they submit them to a secure online vault. “One year later,” the folks at 10Q say, “the vault will open and your answers will wing their way back to your email inbox for private reflection.”

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