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

[jss]

> Anyone else do this?
Yes and no.

At my first post-college job, I kept a hardcopy notebook of every support call or trouble ticket I worked. Customer name, organization, system serial number, ticket number, and any notes on the issue. Useful at the time, less so a decade plus later so these have been shredded and destroyed instead of following me around the country whenever I move (MI TX IL MA MN so far).

I no longer keep a daily log of what I did on a specific day. I do keep an ongoing status report window open and send them off on a week-by-week basis to $manager just before I leave at the end of my week. It's a high-level list of what I worked on, who I sent mail to, that kind of thing. It doesn't include things like specific trouble-tickets because that's queryable in the ticket database. I have these weekly reports available on live spindle in case I need to go back, and can consolidate them into monthly or quarterly or even annual reports as needed, e.g. for an annual or semiannual review.

When I'm unemployed and there's much less data to go in them, I default to monthly, mainly to keep track of where I've sent resumes for which positions.

Since hardcopy isn't searchable, I keep mine in electronic (plaintext) form on a disk physically on my home network. I ssh from work to home to edit it, and send the edited weekly reports to $manager. (He doesn't see the "Home network changes" or "Jobhunt" sections, for example.) I'm reasonably confident I'm the only one on my team of (now) six to submit status reports of any kind.