Are you wondering if you should keep a productivity journal at home or work?
Do you want to get more done during the day and feel good about what you’ve completed?
In this article, you’ll find several reasons why you should track your work efforts with a productivity journal.
What is a Productivity Journal?
A productivity journal is a journal that contains key information about your ability to accomplish projects, assignments, and tasks.
It’s a convenient way for you to document and track your progress on a project or assignment in your business.
You can analyze exactly how you spend your time and energy.
What’s more, a productivity journal can be kept for a relatively short period of time.
It’s a great way to take a snapshot of your work efforts over the course of a day, week, month, or season.
For example, if you can’t remember what you accomplished last week, then you may want to consider keeping a productivity journal.
How Do You Make a Productivity Journal?
Thankfully, the process of creating a productivity journal for your needs doesn’t have to be anything fancy.
The key is to have some sort of contained writing device that allows you to take note of your progress.
You can use a blank notebook or journal or a loose leaf binder for your productivity journal.
So, how should you go about making your productivity journal fit for note taking?
One way to use your journal is to simply write the date at the top of each page and track your progress.
But don’t let that stop you from unleashing your creativity.
You can certainly add as much detail as you like if you want more customization in your journal.
If you’re looking for ideas on organizing a notebook, be sure to check out my self-guided work notebook workshop.
And if you’re more digitally inclined, you could use a text editor or word processing document to record your thoughts.
Whether you track your progress in a physical paper journal or a digital note taking app, you’ll be one step ahead in your work!
What type of information can you record in a productivity journal?
So, what type of information should you add to a productivity journal?
It really all depends on what productivity-specific information you want to record and measure.
Productivity is made up of many different components. Obviously, there’s the amount of total work produced within a certain period of time.
But there’s much more information that can be captured that can be useful to you in your work. This can include when, where, and how you performed the work.
For example, you could track of any combination of the following pieces of information:
- Month, day, and year
- Current project or assignment
- Completed tasks for the day
- Minutes or hours spent completing a task
- Energy levels before completing a task
- Energy levels after completing a task
- Location of task completion
- Productivity methods used
- Convenient or helpful tools used
Before you create your journal, be sure to choose whatever information you wish to track in your journal.
Then, simply gather the corresponding data as needed. You can then record each piece of information on a daily or weekly basis.
3 Practical Reasons Why You Should Keep a Productivity Journal
Now you know a little bit more about what a productivity journal is, how to create one, and what include in one.
Let’s move on to three key reasons why it’s well worth keeping a productivity journal in the first place.
You have a dedicated space to track and record your progress
There’s a difference between wanting to be more productive and being more productive.
The two do not necessarily exist in the same space!
If you’re serious about filing more papers today than you did yesterday, you’ll need to monitor your progress.
Keeping a quantitative record of your accomplishments will allow you to clearly see what and how much you accomplished.
Thankfully, a productivity journal allows you to keep this information in a single contained space.
No more being distracted by your daily to-dos, appointments on your calendar, or work assignments.
And you can say goodbye to those scraps of paper or sticky notes with your findings.
You can easily review data and focus on your work without unnecessary interruptions or disruptions.
You can find commonalities you may not have found otherwise
Have you ever reviewed your calendar at the end of the year? The power of hindsight can be quite valuable.
Patterns are a normal part of our daily routines. But you must pay attention to these patterns to make the most of them.
When you keep a productivity journal you have factual information available for your evaluation.
For instance, those weekly bimonthly business trips and daily gym visits can become crystal clear in the blink of an eye.
Review your productivity journal at the end the week. You might uncover some surprising and startling information about how you work.
You might find you don’t work well in the mornings, but thrive in the afternoon.
Or, you may believe you don’t make progress on cataloging videos on Thursdays afternoon.
But in fact you catalog more on Thursdays than Mondays.
You can record and rank tools, resources, and materials
Part of the joy in working efficiently is finding those tools and resources that make it easy to complete your work.
What if you could take things one step further and actually take note of, classify, and grade your tools?
Doing so may make your productivity levels soar! You’ll know exactly what items ultimately help or hinder your efforts.
By using this technique, you can evaluate productivity tools, resources, and materials side by side.
For instance, you could identify which project planning programs worked well under certain circumstances.
You could rank all the productivity to-do apps you’ve used over the past few years.
Why not decide which apps are best for work or personal use?
How about grading apps on their ease of use, practicality, and overall effectiveness?
As you can see, it can always help to have a written record of your productivity experiences.
There’s so many different components of our work days that we can quickly forget what worked and what didn’t.
Fortunately, when your productivity efforts are accurately captured, you can take targeted steps to make improvements to your daily routine both now, and in future.
In case we haven’t yet met, it’s nice to meet you! Hi, I’m Rashelle Isip, The Order Expert®, productivity coach for entrepreneurs, small business owners, and professionals.
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