Wondering how to create a productivity timeline to track your work at the office?

Looking for some practical tips to help you learn from the past?

Timelines are a convenient way to plan projects and track progress in your business.

While most timelines are forward-thinking, there’s great benefit to using timelines to help you review the past.

Timeline reviews allow you to objectively evaluate past work, experiences, situations, and scenarios.

What’s more, hindsight brings forth all sorts of revelations and musings you might not have previously noticed.

Here’s a simple six-step process you can use in your professional and personal life to help you learn from the past and better prepare for the future.

Schedule time for your review.

A timeline review is best accomplished when you have both the physical time and space dedicated to the task.

You can think of the process as slowly peeling back the layers of an onion.

Once you’ve uncovered one chunk of information, there’s still more information to explore.

While remembering experiences is helpful, the act of writing review notes allows you to solidify your experiences and have them readily available as a paper record.

Grab a pen or pencil and use your favorite notebook to create your timeline.

Choose a specific timeframe.

Make the most of your review session by analyzing a specific timeframe.

You’re free to select any timeframe you so wish, be it the calendar year, months, weeks, or even days of the week.

Having trouble deciding your timeframe?

Ask yourself what you would most like to learn about a certain event or time period within your business.

If you want a more comprehensive evaluation, try a monthly or yearly approach.

For more targeted evaluations, try doing a weekly or daily timeline review.

Once your timeline is selected, write out the start and end dates on consecutive pages.

You’ll soon fill in all the juicy details after this step.

Write down major events.

Start at the beginning of your time and add major events that are notable or noticeable for you and your work.

These can be anything and everything from product launches, in-person events, and internal meetings to client acquisitions.

There’s no need to justify or qualify an event’s importance.

If an event is still top of mind for you, then there’s probably something to be learned from your experience.

Simply write down the event in question and continue to work your way through the timeline, adding different events as they come to mind.

Gather challenges, beliefs, thoughts, and outcomes.

We don’t always have the luxury to fully understand or appreciate circumstances surrounding events as we’re experiencing them.

That’s where this next task comes in; it’s an opportunity for us to reflect on practical matters as well as our personal experience with them.

Carefully review each event on your timeline and ask yourself the following questions:

• What challenges did I or my company face during this time?
• What beliefs did I have about this event as it was happening?
• What thoughts did I have during this time?
• What were the ultimate outcomes of this situation?

Asking yourself open-ended questions like these will help you shift your mind’s focus toward finding answers.

Evaluate events in context with one another.

It’s now time to make connections.

Take a look at events that are in close proximity to one another.

Ask yourself how each event may or may not have affected the next.

What’s more, it’s worth taking a look at events spaced far apart from one another.

Even the most distant events have some sort of commonalities with one another.

What connections or contrasts do you notice?

Once you start reviewing events, you’ll soon find yourself making different evaluations, connections, and realizations.

Make careful note of relevant event information as soon as it enters your mind.

Create a key learnings summary.

Your timeline review will give you a new perspective toward your past, and potentially future work.

Develop a key learning summary to record the details of your review.

Pull out the most important learnings from your timeline review and narrow them down to five to seven items, tops.

Lastly, create a folder and save your timeline for future review along with your key learnings.

Make a note to repeat the timeline review process in a few months’ time or when you so choose.

How about you? When are you going to try this productivity timeline technique? Join the conversation and leave a comment below!

This post originally appeared on Inc.com.