I keep track of everything i do in excel privately too. I have a log like that since my first job, dating back a dozen years.
I use some basic conditional formatting to highlight today's tasks. I write down everything I do. Small assists and unplanned work are added after the fact. Each row had a do date, a project tag, and notes such as reminders of who to contact about it.
This helps me be extremely organized and not forgetting any tasks even down the road. I also keep track of pet projects and identify good times to work on those. Also made me way better at guesstimating how long something will take and spread out workload from upcoming busy periods more.
This has made it trivial for me to prepare weekly stand ups, quarterly business reports and yearly reviews.
The only downside is I can't keep it up when I'm really overworked. Those periods stand out as several week gaps in the task tracker. I just lose the granularity but i still know which project was problematic using high level roadmaps and notes from retros/5 whys - so i can add a basic note for the period about what projects i was working on at the time.
I have a simplified changelog like that for personal projects as well.
I use some basic conditional formatting to highlight today's tasks. I write down everything I do. Small assists and unplanned work are added after the fact. Each row had a do date, a project tag, and notes such as reminders of who to contact about it.
This helps me be extremely organized and not forgetting any tasks even down the road. I also keep track of pet projects and identify good times to work on those. Also made me way better at guesstimating how long something will take and spread out workload from upcoming busy periods more.
This has made it trivial for me to prepare weekly stand ups, quarterly business reports and yearly reviews. The only downside is I can't keep it up when I'm really overworked. Those periods stand out as several week gaps in the task tracker. I just lose the granularity but i still know which project was problematic using high level roadmaps and notes from retros/5 whys - so i can add a basic note for the period about what projects i was working on at the time. I have a simplified changelog like that for personal projects as well.