Work Logs

[bjarvis]

Does anyone out there keep logs of their daily work activities?


Thursday, November 16, 2006
8 AM - Arrival; 8:45 AM daily status conference call
- SOX: Evidence collection for Scott Atkins
- SOX: Tracing ID ownerships for Mario Wiley
- NIS+ retirement conference call, update reports & ticket submissions
- Standards docs update, review
- Documentation meeting with Greg, Anne, Jack & Chris
4 PM - Departure


I've been writing my general activities into a worklog every day since 1997 or so. I started when I became a contractor as a contracting mentor strongly recommended keeping these records in case some client should ever question an invoice. Since becoming a full-time employee in 2003, there's been a reduced need but the logs still are very useful, especially now during our annual performance review activities.

I keep my logs handwritten in dead tree format. It's much harder to search for past items, but the book is clearly owned by me: the employer can't possibly access it or begin to claim ownership over it if a dispute should arise. These are my records, not the company's records. Written in my hand, it can't be easily modified or forged. Since I started this for accounting & audit purposes, these factors trounce the potential usefulness of searchability. (Detailed procedures and commands or particularly unusual events get scribbled into my Palm if there's a chance I'll need to search for them.)

Anyone else do this?

Comments

[allanh.livejournal.com]

For each job, I keep a running log of everything I do, kind of like a bomb squad defuser keeping a running dialog going of which wires he's cutting.

The comparison is not entirely tongue-in-cheek. And the extended logs serve several purposes.

My staff calls these roman-a-clefs, "Allan's latest novels". On the other hand, about half of the people who make fun of them, come back to me later and ask me about some technique they spotted in there that they'd never heard of.

The novels also give clients a sense of worth; they feel better spending (large amounts of money per hour) for my services if they know what I'm doing.

Finally, when working with Novell, Microsoft, Symantec, SyncSort, HP, Dell, or IBM Support ... emailing them the log while we're on the phone saves lots of time and energy, and helps them to help me solve the problem faster, since they can see exactly what I've done prior to calling them.

If you like, I can mail you a sample log...

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

For more "interesting" server work, I usually execute typescript to maintain a transcript of my commands and results. Invaluable for truly ugly system recoveries.

[allanh.livejournal.com]

If I only worked on one server or system at a time, that would be wonderful. *sigh* Typically, I work on three or four systems at once, bringing them all into line for such network niceties as SSL, SLP, DNS, or eDirectory. Even the Linux boxes. It would be a pain to try to edit together three or four or more typescript logs...so it's easier for me to stop and record what I'm doing.

More than one client has looked over my shoulder at my log, and commented "Don't cut the blue wire!"