Documenting a daily work record is like going to the gym, you don’t see the effect overnight but if you’re consistent enough you can see a massive change in the long run.
In earlier days of my career I had few tips from my seniors and role models. I didn’t know the importance of those back then but now when I look back I can clearly see that those tips have a major role in shaping my career.
Keeping track of daily work status is not a very big thing or it doesn’t require much effort or smartness, all it needs is consistency. Being specific to my domain, I work on tickets so it is very simple for me to keep track of all the tickets I work on in a day with respect to what my contribution to the ticket was. I manage my work record in a google sheet where I can have a list of tickets, my contribution in it and if there are any inputs or appreciations on my work.
Best advantage of keeping daily work records is you can adjust the pace of your work, you can compare how many tickets you’re working on a weekly / monthly basis. If you see the number of tickets, inputs or appreciations are more or less you can make necessary adjustments to your work and make sure it is going on as per expectations.
Suppose you work on 5 tickets a day, in a month of 20 working days you will have 100 tickets to build a monthly report. You will have data of your contribution, inputs or appreciations. Speaking of the yearly report you can have 1200 tickets with the data. And you don’t need to collect the data at the eleventh hour every month end or year end to build your work reports.
If you have such massive data in your hand at the end of year, it will definitely help you in building your self evaluation. When you mention all the inputs you had and how you improved, all the appreciations you got; imagine yourself going into an appraisal meeting with this data and confidence.
This was a specific example for someone working in a similar domain, but you can make necessary changes according to your domain. The point over here is keeping your daily work record is not for reporting it to your manager or following any process but it will help you in organizing your work and make you a better professional.
As they say ‘Rome was not built in a day’ it applies to almost everything you do; learning or mastering Meditation, Yoga, Maths, Music, playing sports or anything. You can have a supportive body or brain as a God gift to start something and get initial success but if you want to master something you need to make consistent efforts to achieve it.