Tracking Daily Activities

Welcome to lesson one. This carries on from last week’s post. Hope you find it as useful as do.

Small Business Success Program: Business Success Lesson 1

By Susan Ward, About.com

Tracking Your Daily Activities

First, we need to know what you actually do each day. As business people, we all wear many hats during the day (and sometimes at night, too). But what does this mean? What tasks are we actually performing and how much time do we spend on each activity?

Tracking your daily activities lets you see where your valuable time is being spent, and gives you the data you need to set goals and make the changes to your work habits that will make you more successful.

Daily Activity Tracking Tips

Use a device to record your daily activities that is constantly accessible to you, so you can record exactly what you do when you do it. Memory is fallible – and kind.

A Day-Timer or calendar, a PDA, an organizer software program, a digital recorder, or an ordinary notebook will all work to record your daily activities; choose whichever method you are already comfortable with and find the easiest to use.

I use a Day-Timer because I like the way it’s organized and most of my work takes place in my office. Using a device to track your daily activities that’s preformatted into days and hours saves you the time of formatting the device yourself.

Don’t record unnecessary information; it’s the activity and the time you spent on it that’s important for our purposes. For instance, my entry related to writing this article would be only “writing Tracking Daily Activities”, covering the amount of time it took to write it.

Homework Assignment: Tracking Daily Activities

This week, record all your daily activities and the amount of time you spent on each. If you already keep daily records, continue with whatever system you’re using, being sure to focus on what you actually do.

Don’t distinguish between business and personal activities at this point. You need to have a complete picture of your schedule so you can more easily see where to make the changes that will make you more successful.