How to keep a work log

A record of what you did and decided, in the order it happened, with the next step at the end.

It isn’t a timesheet. You don’t log hours; if you bill time, keep a time tracker alongside it.

Copy this into each new entry and delete the lines you don’t need.

Done:
Decided (and why):
Stuck on:
Next:

Put the date at the top if your tool doesn’t add it. There’s no line for the project, because each project gets a log of its own.

A filled-in entry, from a developer’s log:

Done: product search answers in 120 ms on staging; tests pass.
Decided: index titles only for now, because full text doubles the index.
Stuck on: “Müller” doesn’t match “Muller”.
Next: try the accent filter on the staging index.

The best moment is right before you move to something else, while the detail is still in your head. By evening you remember what you did, but not what you were about to try, and Next is the line you need on Monday morning. More on coming back: how to resume a project after a break.

One sentence is enough: “Stopped here: the migration runs on staging; next, the two failing reports.”

A single log for everything turns into a list where three projects interleave. Keep one per project, so each reads as one story and its last entry is always where that project starts again.

If you work on one project at a time, one daily log is enough. With several, a short entry in a separate “Week” log can list what moved in each.

When a decision changes, write a new entry that says so and why. When someone asks in March why you dropped the second payment provider, the answer is there with its date, next to what you knew at the time.

On Friday, read the week’s last entries in each project and write three lines:

Shipped:
Learned:
Next week:

Those three lines are your status update. Over a year they add up to a record of your work for a performance review or a brag document. In nearly 12,000 diary entries from 238 employees in seven companies, Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer found that progress in meaningful work, even in small steps, mattered more to people’s days at work than anything else (The Progress Principle).