Earlier this year, I made an attempt at trying to keep a work log. I wanted to try and keep track of the actual time that I spend on projects. Until the task fell by the wayside, I think I was doing a fairly decent job of it. I’m always reading about how it’s a good idea to keep logs for tracking time and improving productivity. I do think it helped with that a bit but also, it felt good to do too! There was just something very satisfying about having a somewhat concrete work log. It was nice to see that I am, in fact, productive with my time.
Pictured below is the first a work log that kept by hand. I kept it on the last page of my fifth Sketchbook Minor. Writing them by hand was sort of fun. Doing so helped me slip into the project mentality a little more easily. As you can see however, I didn’t properly format things at first. As I wrote more in the logs, I realized I wasn’t keeping track of the dates for each entry. Then, since I was often on the move, I decided to add a field for work locations as well. Sad to see that I don’t spend a lot of time working at home.
Switching to a digital work log
After awhile I wanted to try a more efficient way of tracking my work. The problem with hand written logs is that eventually you run out of space to write. I didn’t really want anything too complicated to I tried keeping a digital log in a simple Keep note.
My main reason for logging a reason for stopping is that I wanted to see why progress was being halted. What was interrupting me all the time. Eventually, I couldn’t keep track of that anymore. The drop off in log activity coincides with a some events in my life that occurred this year. I’ll try logging my time again soon. I’ll be looking into different timekeeping apps until I find something I’m satisfied with.
