Personal Changelogs for Things Gotten Done
Posted on May 26th, 2005
I read David Allan's book Getting Things Done last summer, and started following the 43 Folders website and newsgroup shortly after. I've picked up a lot of tips about organization, prioritizing, and productivity but as I was thinking about timesheets the other day, I realized there was one thing that GTD-style organization wasn't covering.
GTD is all about the present and the future. It's a way of getting things in order so that you can make the most of your time to accomplish the things you want to accomplish without getting sucked into perpetual procrastination. Great and double great. But what happens after you've done whatever it is you've set out to do? The record of the task probably gets deleted as part of the mental reward for a job well done, and you move on to the next thing.
Now about timesheets. Every company I've ever worked for has asked me to account for where and what I'm spending my time on. Usually it's for client billing purposes. And I've always hated this form of accounting. Partly because the software I entered my time into invariably sucked, but more so because I didn't benefit. The company I was working for benefited because my hours and comments were going into their system. I got nothing out of the transaction.
So on the one hand you have GTD focusing on getting things done, but not much in the way of logging history, and on the other hand you have timesheets that log history but not necessarily with the same personal significance that GTD offers. My solution is a personal changelog.
If we're talking software, a changelog is a record of everything that has been fixed since the last release. If we're talking people though, a changelog is a record of everything you've done, day by day. Not the minutiae-- woke up at 8AM, had cornflakes for breakfast, brushed teeth-- and not necessarily an hour by hour accounting. Just the highlights, so that you can look back in the coming weeks and months and realize that you really were doing something on this particular date, and that there really was something notable going on before the mental fog rolled in and blurred that day into all the other days that make up the past.
Timesheets will still be the stuff that conscription is made of, but with a personal changelog you've got a statement of record that's all your own. And you can customize it to whatever way makes sense for you. I'm partial to the outline approach. At the topmost level of the outline are the days of the week, followed underneath by your projects, followed in turn underneath by your list of completed tasks. At the start of a new week, start with a fresh file and send your old one to the archives. Maybe you use text files for this, maybe you use Microsoft Word. Whatever. It's sort of like a blog, but deliberately private and far more terse.
I've been using an approach like that for the past week, and the minimal amount of effort involved with updating it has worked out well.