Work Tool: Daily Journal

A record of your past, a tool for your future.

I keep a daily journal of all my work tasks. I split the day into morning and afternoon and create a bullet point for every major work task. Sub-bullets can be used to split up big tasks into their subcomponents. An outline is found below.

Why do I do this? Two small reasons and one really big one.

First, it helps me track how productive I am. It provides a handy visualization of how much I did during the day.

Second, it helps me review my day. Again, I can see at a glance what I got done during the day.

Third, and this is the big one, it gives me a record I can refer back to. This is especially important when I've done something technical--like several iterations of coding, several months ago--and I need to remember what I did so I can do it again for a current project. Another use is being able to determine what, when, or how much of something I did. Because I often write out filenames of important Word documents, R-code, PDFs, etc., I can go back and copy the name so I can find it on my computer. Or maybe I had a meeting with a researcher and I need to determine how long ago that was. Or perhaps I started work on a dataset and will use the find button in Word to see how many times I worked on it.

I started the daily journal process on and off during graduate school. However, in my current job, I've completed it every work day for the two years I've been here. I now have two Word documents journaling 2020 (54 pages) and 2021 (68 pages). From the page number, it looks like I've gotten more productive. Or more likely, I've just gotten more verbose.

There's a daily work tool for you. Cheers.

examples from 2021 (names are blacked out for privacy)

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