resolution: Update work journal

Do you keep a work journal?  I’ve tried in the past, stopped, and have picked it up as one of my attainable goals this year.

Back in DC I was asked a few times a year to summarize what big projects I’d worked on.  That was mostly for my supervisor to accurately complete a performance review.  Since it was a summary it wasn’t fairly detailed and was updated on demand, not on a regular basis.

In New York I would keep track of my hours worked.  My job in DC was an hourly contract, so that was part the daily grind, but in NYC it was more about showing how much time I had already spent working that week.  Our team was understaffed and our boss would drop projects on us Friday afternoon expecting work over the weekend.  Keeping track of those hours gave me a bit of ammo when we’d ask for more resources, more organization, or just to feel a bit of accomplishment.

Here in Florida I don’t really have any of these requirements.  My boss has asked us to keep track of time (which I need to remember to do along with my work journal!), but in the year I’ve been here there’s been no performance review.  I’ve added the goal of keeping a daily log of what I work on simply for my own sanity.  We tend to jump around from project to project and I’ve found that it’s so much easier to open up my word doc and see exactly where I left off the Friday prior to a Monday.  If I can’t pick it up right away, my notes along with the day or two before can usually catch me up.

The process is pretty easy.  I just have a Word document sitting on my desktop, enter a date line, and add bullets for each major task.  Simple tracking and organization.

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