Your Daily Success Log
When Saturday rolls around and people take a detailed look at their past week, they often showcase a variety of emotions. On one hand, people are elated that they made solid progress towards their dreams; on the other hand, people are saddened by the fact they’re not sure where or how much progress was actually made. Across the board, these people vow “Next week I’ll have a sharper focus and get more accomplished.”
9 times out of 10, this type of weekly review fails you. Why? Because it’s flimsy, it doesn’t hold you accountable for what you’ve done (or didn’t do). Your memory is inherently biased; you don’t think in terms of specifics, you think in terms of visuals. When you try to objectively look back at your past week, what comes out is a mess of “I did this… sort of did that… didn’t do that at all… ah, oh well, next week will be better!”
An easy way to circumvent this disastrous problem is to keep a simple track of all of your accomplishments during the course of a day - what I like to call your “daily success log”. When you meet a daily quota for a goal that you set - say, 30 minutes of exercise - write it down on a running file on your computer or a page in a notebook (divided up by days, of course). You can choose to track a certain area that needs desperate improvement (such as health and fitness) or an overall “improve my life” spectrum that covers everything.
I’ve been using a daily success log to track the various advertising and marketing aspects of my blog - blog carnival submissions, forum posts, blog comments, emailing other bloggers, the list goes on and on. I have to say, from first hand experience, keeping a log of everything I’ve done really helps me keep focus. When I’m having a lackluster day and nothing seems to be going in my favor, I just look back at the accomplishments I’ve made so far. That propels me to go even farther and try even harder to get something done; my motivation returns!
You can use a daily success log to track a variety of things in your life:
- Health and Fitness - max amount of time you want to exercise / watch TV / sleep / stay online, max amount of cups of coffee you want to drink, calories eaten, % of calories coming from fat
- Career - # of leads followed up on, hours spent researching / formatting / completing a project, # of applications sent in to various employers
- Hobby and Free Time - amount of time practicing a musical instrument, # of posts you made in your blog
If you wanted, you could break everything down into even greater detail. For example, if you were logging how much you practiced a musical instrument, you could elaborate with what time you practiced at, what pieces you practiced, musical problems you fixed, and technical difficulties you want to solve in future practice sessions.
All in all, a daily success log holds you accountable for all of your actions. You can’t elaborate or escape cold, hard facts - you either did action that moved you towards your goals, or you skipped out and didn’t do anything. Your log will say it all!
Try out the log for a couple of weeks. What aspects of your life can you begin to keep tabs on? What improvements can you make to the basic outline I presented here?
Ali from The Office Diet said,
February 19, 2008 @ 2:03 am
I agree that keeping a log is incredibly helpful — in fact, I was writing about how to keep fitness, diet or general health logs a few days ago (see http://www.theofficediet.com/2008/02/15/keeping-a-diary-journal-or-log/ )
Another great tip I’ve come across, from Mark Forster, is to write a “What was better” list each day. This means finding the things that were BETTER than before (rather than just keeping a record of good things in general, or of everything you did.) I wrote about this at http://www.theofficediet.com/2008/01/16/how-were-you-healthier-today/ from a healthy living perspective, but it can be applied to any aspect of life. I’m keeping a daily list during Lent and it’s been a real help to salvage some good things from days where it felt like “everything went wrong.”