Keep a Diary of Your Achievements to Stay on Course in 2012
January 9 by Chris Skoyles in Productivity | 132 Shares
So, the New Year is upon us and you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve in 2012. You’ve written your goals, made your plans and to-do lists, and you’re ready to go; marching onwards to success armed with an unwavering sense of motivation and some useful productivity tools.
Once you’ve started, it’s important to ensure that you remain on course and the actions you take on a day-to-day basis are steering you towards to the ‘Promised Land’ known as Success.Writing down your achievements at the end of the day, rather than just crossing them off a to-do list as you go along has more benefits than you might think.
How to record your achievements
There are a number of ways you could do this; keeping a blog or paper journal , using a whiteboard of maybe a productivity app.
Alternatively, try using a week-to-view desk diary.
Why use a diary?
You easily glance over a week’s achievements and review your progress (more of which later).
More importantly, using a week-to-view, you’ll find that you only have a few lines per day to note down your key achievements, which helps you to focus only on the things that really matter.
What to do
To start, take the first page of your diary or inside cover and list your goals so you’ll be able to quickly refer to them whenever you need a reminder of what you’re trying to achieve.
If you’re breaking these big goals down into weekly goals, you could write these across the top of each week in your diary.
What to record
Whatever your goals for the year, only record the tasks you’ve done that relate specifically to those goals. My main goals this year include running a marathon and writing at least 300,000 words.
Each day I note how long I trained for, how many words I wrote and what I wrote them for (Lifehack or a blog post for example), along with anything else that supports those goals such as researching diet plans or brainstorming article ideas.
What not to record
You probably get through a lot of stuff during the course of an average day, but the idea of this exercise is to look at how much of that stuff is contributing to your goals. If you haven’t done much towards your goals, you may be tempted to fill your diary with other busy work to convince yourself that you’ve at least been productive.
Don’t, it doesn’t help.
You may feel really proud that you spent all day cleaning your house from top-to-bottom and having a really good de-clutter, but unless one of your goals is to win the “Tidiest House in the World 2012 Award,” again, don’t put it down.
What’s next?
At the end of each week it pays to look back through your diary and review your progress. It’s always nice to look back and see that you’ve had a productive week working towards your goals, but your review should help you find room for improvement.
If you haven’t written anything for a specific goal in a couple of days, is that a sign that maybe you need to work extra hard on that goal? Or maybe that goal wasn’t as important to you as you first thought and it’s time to reassess? If you notice that you haven’t been doing much goal-orientated work on a specific day each week, can you identify reasons for that and do something about it? If you’ve been cruising along nicely but haven’t seen much improvement, is now the time to think about taking things to the next level? Perhaps your training sessions for the last three weeks all ran to 30 minutes. Can you now maybe do 45 minutes?
If everything’s been going perfectly and you’ve been recording great progress with continual improvement, you can give yourself a firm pat on the back knowing that you’re well on course for great success in 2012.
(Photo credit: Male hand drawing a chart via Shutterstock)
I disagree, almost entirely. I just wrote a post about a week and a half ago about keeping an already done list. I recommend putting everything on that list, no matter how trivial. It’s almost always something that needs to get done, and we’re already so hard on ourselves when we don’t “feel” productive. To say that doing the dishes is “not productive” because it doesn’t relate to a goal is, frankly, BS. Social interactions, general tidiness, exercise, etc., all help make us more productive, and it’s cruel to not give ourselves credit for doing those things because they are only tangentially productive. Besides, it’s super motivating to see a list of things you’ve accomplished, even if they’re just little things like vacuuming. Feeling accomplished drives further accomplishment. When I see a list of 40 things I’ve accomplished in a day, even if they’re all really little things, I feel pumped; I feel ready to take on the world. If I only recorded the 2 things that directly related to my goals, I’d feel like a complete failure, and eventually that would wear me down until I wasn’t even able to manage those two things. This is just a to do list in disguise. You’re checking items off by writing them down after you do them.
Sorry you disagree Matt! The idea behind this isn’t simply to track how productive you are -crossing off items on a general to-do list should accomplish that for you- but rather to keep track of the things that are most important to you and making sure you stay on course with the things that matter.
I still keep a long to-do list list for each week and accomplish much more than I actually note down in my diary at the end of the day, but not everything I do on that list is going to matter in the long run.
If I look through my diary at the end of the week and see that I tidied my house for five days but only went running once, I’d start to worry.I think what you’re suggesting (and forgive me if I’m wrong) is that it’s the quantity of stuff you do that matters, as long as your productive with something, everything’s OK.
My personal view is that how many items I tick off my to-do list throughout each day isn’t as important as making sure that the items I do kick off count towards my bigger life goals. To each their own though!
Ah! I think we ultimately have the same end goal. I don’t like keeping a to do list because it ultimately puts an artificial pressure on doing specific things, which can ultimately lead to a sense of failure. With my strategy, you’re going to piggy back off the success of doing the dishes (or whatever it is) to energize yourself for the more goal-oriented tasks. With either strategy, it’s going to be obvious that the things you need to do to accomplish your goals aren’t being added to the list. The hope with my strategy is to avoid punishing oneself for being the “wrong kind of productive”, which will lower motivation, and instead, reward oneself for any kind of productivity in order to bolster motivation. But, for me, keeping my motivation up is the big issue, and feeling like I’ve been unproductive will just make me more unproductive. I won’t forget to take steps toward my goals—being motivated to take those steps is another beast altogether.