Journaling for Personal Productivity | Ravindra Kondekar

Here is an interesting way to maintain a journal that makes you more productive as well. Journal means different things to different people and what I mean here is recording everything that you do in your day. Not exciting? Hear me out!

First and foremost (as you would expect me to say this), it should be digital. It should be maintained in spreadsheet App, like Excel, as to me journal is tabular data then a series data. A row represents a day and a column represents a track or a role that you play. Typically, you will have four columns in your journal, namely, Job track, Vocation track, Reading/Learning track and Personal/family track. See the picture.

You should record all that you do on a day, in one of the tracks, in the corresponding cell. Record all that which took your significant time and also something that was important although took just a little time. Ideally, you should record the work as soon as you finish it and end of the day should be the good time to complete it fully for the day. Color the week-end rows in red to create boundaries for work weeks.

Let’s see the benefits:

1. When you say to yourself that a task is complete by means of recording it in the journal, the reflective mode brings out the loose ends and you get a chance of completing the task cleanly. This is invaluable.
2. It gives you a soft way to record and monitor your productivity. Lot easier and simpler than recording hours and minutes.
3. When you trace individual columns across several days, you will be able to see if a track is getting lesser attention for you to nudge yourself to pay more attention to that track.
4. It builds a great reward mechanism for the hard work you put in. There is no other pleasure than looking at a row that is packed with interesting work and that too in all your tracks. Pat your own back!
5. You could fold any of the track into regular weekly reports. Once you have weekly reports, they can be easily folded into monthly, quarterly and yearly. Updating your Career documents, self-appraisal, profiles and resumes become not only incidental, but exciting also. Our brain likes to build such stories if the points are available, and a journal will provide you those points.
6. A minor but still interesting benefit is that you know, when you did what.

You have to be regular with it though. Initially to get into habit you should set some reminders for yourselves. New year is round the corner and if you are looking for some resolutions, try this one.

Originally published at http://ravindrakondekar.com on December 19, 2020.