BrT

Almost two months ago, I wrote about my new productivity technique of keeping a handwritten log of my daily activities. At the time I had been doing it for about a month, but I was still in the “excited about it” phase, so I thought it would be fair to do a review after two months have passed.

The good news is that I am still keeping my daily, handwritten, detailed logs. The logs have helped me identify interruptions, which has in turn helped me to establish measures for avoiding those interruptions (e.g. turn off IM/Mail, close my door when I’m working on something).

The bad news is that it requires discipline to keep it up. I have found it easy to slip in the sense of not recording everything I do (which is the crux of the technique – every little thing has to bee there) and after a few hours have passed, just back-filling it with what I think was most relevant). Some days in which I have been really low on energy or motivation, I have simply stopped writing. But the positive side is that, even for those “bad” days, keeping the log helps to realize when they happened. And I think it’s OK: everyone has good days and bad days. The log has helped me to keep track of both of them, and hopefully to fix what I can.

In conclusion, keeping the log has been a worthwhile technique for me, so I will continue doing it. And looking back through my log, it’s very satisfying to see all those check marks for my completed tasks.