Benefits of Keeping an Activity Log

Time is a resource no one can ever seem to find enough of. There are simply too many things to do, and no matter how you try to organize or plan, you always seem to run out of time right before something crucial doesn’t get done. This is the exact reason why activity logs exist!

But how much value can there really be in keeping a record of what you do and when you do it? What are the benefits of keeping an activity log?

Activity Logs Give You More Time

Not literally, of course. But when you take the time to chart out the hours of your day or your team’s day, you’ll notice something interesting: though you feel like there’s never enough time, the fact of the matter is that there certainly is. It’s just about planning appropriately. When you check your log to see that you lost an hour here or ten minutes there, you can shore up your losses in the future, leading to more productive stints of time in which far more gets done.

Activity Logs Vastly Improve Organization (and Reduce Stress)

Staying organized feels impossibly hard to many, if not most of us. We’re happy to say, however, that the fault is less often that of the person organizing, but more in a lack of proper technique. You couldn’t be expected to recount the exact contents of a storage bin by memory alone and without a list, so why would you expect to keep your time organized without a list too?

With a detailed activity log in-hand you can see where your time is going to go for the day, which helps you to keep appointments, to stay ahead of deadlines, and to let you know when the time has come to reallocate resources or labor in order to address drops in productivity.

Activity Logs Help to Eliminate Time Wasters

Absolutely no one will tell you that you should devote all of your waking hours to work (and if someone does, remember it’s your life). Whether you’re fond of yoga, games, television, or organizing your gallery of cute cat pictures, downtime is essential to your mental health. However, an activity stops being recreation and starts being a time waster when you use it to procrastinate or when it causes you to fail to get something done.

Keeping an activity log can show you just how often you forsake doing what needs to be done in favor of five more minutes poking around Pinterest. By evaluating when and where in your day you choose to take part in fun, you’ll soon find that much of it isn’t even enjoyable because you’re doing it in lieu of meeting your personal goals for the day.

Activity Logs Back You Up

If you have a written record of the things you’ve done, then you not only have a reference of all your previous tasks, but you also have more proof that you completed various things! If your boss asks you what happened to that report you were supposed to finish last month (or claims you never finished it), you can go back to the exact day you finished it and use that to help prove you really did what you were supposed to!

Using an activity log can put your time management plan on a whole new level, helping you to keep track of the most important resource you have. When you need to know how to manage your day, how to organize it, and how to execute it efficiently, trust in the log and all will be well!