A simple work logbook

Keep track of accomplishments and plans in minutes! Use a simple logbook to capture highlights from your work that add up to a bigger story over time.

As a designer, it’s important I document my work to keep my portfolio up to date. While I’m in the middle of a project, everything feels so immediate and important. It’s so easy to think I’ll never forget the details I’ve spent hours on. The truth is, my memory is not as watertight as I’d like. New projects come up and my memory is filled with the latest challenges, pushing aside old details to make room for new ones.

So I came up with a simple way to jog my memory and tell the story of my work. It’s what I call my work log. I use a small dot grid notebook measuring 4”x6” that easily fits on the corner of my desk. Each page spread captures the story of a week. The log is both for planning the week ahead and reflecting on work completed.

Weekly Theme

At the top of page, I select a theme to describe the week. I think of it as the overall flavor, rather than a specific task to cross off the list. Often it will be a phase of a project, such as “move into delivery phase” or “new team member onboarding.” Like the titles of a book chapter, I can skim the themes as I flip through the journal and remember the big efforts from that week.

Some weeks, the theme for the week ahead is clear. If I have a big presentation at the end of the week, that will naturally capture a lot of my imagination for the week, so that will be the theme. Other weeks are more ambiguous. Without a clear event or objective known in advance, I’ll sometimes leave the theme blank until later in the week. That gives me time to look for a summary theme to describe how the week unfolded.

Summary

At the end of a day, I take a moment to write bullet points summarizing critical work accomplished, key decisions or pivots made, or other out of the ordinary events. There is enough room to document 3-4 main points, but only as a summary. This area works as a compass or beacon, pointing me where to go in my working files to dive into the details.

Focus

With a quick summary written, I look through the tasks that need to be accomplished next. Usually I have a list of up to a dozen items to work on in the coming days. The focus area of the work log helps me prioritize and group individual tasks into an objective or goal. Analyzing the results of a research survey and creating a presentation with the data contain multiple smaller steps I could write on a to-do list to check off one by one. But together, the objective is to surface insights for my clients to make decisions from. So I write my focus for the day as “Research Insights” or “Research Presentation.”

Realistically, I can only focus on 1-3 large objectives in a day. Anything more than that fractures my attention span and becomes individual tasks of a to-do list. The purpose of identifying a focus is to work more effectively, spending my work hours on what is most important.

Energy Gauge

Now that I’ve captured notes from my day and planned my efforts for tomorrow, it’s time to check in personally. I use the energy gauge to measure my emotions and physical energy from the day. Some days are invigorating, while others are draining. This daily gauge provides data I can look back on to discover themes and correlations that might not be obvious in the day-to-day.

An ideal day is when I feel engaged and positive about the work and look forward to the next morning. I represent this as being “filled up.” Some days leave me feeling physically exhausted but mentally invigorated. I can choose where on the gauge represents that feeling best. Other days—for example, boring days—may not have had much challenging in them, but left me feeling flat. I don’t like boring, so the gauge is much lower those days.

I’ve used the gauge in the past to uncover the types of projects or groups that consistently drained me of energy. Some of these projects were very engaging intellectually and helped me achieve my professional goals, but they came at a cost. I watched the gauge slowly decrease over several months. That was in the information I needed to look for a better fit elsewhere. Conversely, I’ve discovered patterns around the types of days and activities that leave me feeling refreshed and eager for more.

The immediacy of project work can hide these patterns. How do you know if you’re just having an off day because you ran out of coffee or if there is a bigger problem? The gauge can help clue you in.

Insights

At the end of the week, the area at the bottom of the page is perfect to write a description of what the week meant. I use this area to capture insights about how individual accomplishments ladder up, or to write about meaningful interpersonal interactions. The theme at the top of the page is what I anticipated the week would be. The insights at the bottom write the conclusion for how the week played out.

Letting my brain rest

At most, this little ritual takes three to five minutes. Not only do I have a reminder of work completed that I can use later, the ritual tells my brain: “I’m done with work now, it’s time to enjoy the rest of my life.” When I don’t write down the work I did and prioritize the work for the morning, I tend to worry about things. Ideas and tasks run round and round in my brain, which makes it much harder to be fully present in the rest of my life. If I don’t write notes for a day, it’s not the end of the world. But it’s such as simple technique to keep me organized and let me relax!

Photo by Green Chameleon on Unsplash.