Chapter 20

Use a 10-Minute Diary to Stay on Track

by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer

What’s the best way to use the last 10 minutes of your day? Many productivity gurus recommend an end-of-the-day meeting with yourself to review your to-do list, check how you’re doing against short-and long-term goals, or select the most challenging project you’ll tackle the following day. Our research suggests that not only should you do an end-of-day review, but you’ll reap the greatest benefits for your productivity and personal well-being if you actually record your thoughts in a “mini-diary.” A work diary will improve your focus, track your progress, and make you more satisfied with your work—which will help you be even more productive.

No question: This reflective time is often the first thing that we drop when we’re feeling overloaded. Adding a daily writing assignment—the word “diary” conjures up a long-term commitment—seems counterproductive to making headway on “real” work. So try it for just one month, focusing on just one short-term project (for example, developing a departmental staffing plan), or just one area of professional development (improving your presentation skills).

Take 10 minutes at the end of each workday, write no more than 100 words, and see what you’ve learned after four weeks. You may be surprised.

You’ll get five benefits from keeping a work diary. You:

1. Track your progress. The diary is a record of your “small wins,” incremental steps toward meaningful goals, that can boost your motivation—if only you take a moment to reflect on them.
2. Plan. You use the diary as a tool for drafting your next steps.
3. Fuel personal growth. The diary gives you a way of working through your difficult—even traumatic—events, gaining new perspectives on them.
4. Sharpen your focus. You identify your strengths, passions, and challenges by looking at patterns in your entries over time. For example, your diary may reveal that you’ve been spending a lot of time on low-priority issues. Reviewing your diary and identifying this pattern can help you recommit to focusing your time and energy on your most important work.
5. Develop patience. The diary serves as a reminder during frustrating days that, in the past, you’ve persevered through days that, at the time, seemed even worse.

Our research shows that, of all these benefits, using a work diary to track your progress may be the most important one for your productivity and psychological well-being. As part of a massive study on the psychology of everyday work life, we collected nearly 12,000 diary entries from 238 professionals working on complex, creative projects. Our analyses revealed a big surprise. Of all the things that could make people feel both happy and highly motivated to dig into their work, the single most important event was simply making progress in work they cared about. We call this the progress principle, and it applies even when the progress is an incremental small win. When we see we’re making progress, we’re motivated to keep going, and it’s easier to keep our focus—even when we encounter setbacks. Witness this example, from the diary of a software engineer in our study:

Today, when I started work [. . .] there was a note from a user regarding some work I had done for him. It was very complimentary and it made me feel pretty good. Also in the note was a request to go ahead with an enhancement to the database analysis package. I was able to code and load this request today in less than the estimated time, which makes me feel good. And I know it will please our user when he comes in tomorrow.

That entry probably took fewer than five minutes to write. Yet, at the end of the day, that engineer was quite happy—and seems motivated toward high productivity the next day, too. Making progress, and noting it, can provide a real lift—and give you the boost you need to keep working on the projects that will yield the greatest benefit for your organization and its customers.

Daily writing and review helps in negative situations, too. In the following entry, an employee struggles to gain a sense of control during a traumatic event in her company—a downsizing. Even though her own job might still be in jeopardy, her work diary helps her shape a healthy perspective; it enables her to focus on her work, amid swirling gossip and uncertainty. Her personal growth is almost palpable in this entry:

This morning, my project manager came over and sat next to me and asked me if I was okay after all the layoffs that went on yesterday. I thought that was really nice. We all had a very rough day yesterday, but I feel better today. In 45 days, we will all know our fate, and then we can get on with our lives one way or the other. The outcome of all this is really out of our control. I’m trying to concentrate on what IS in my control, by doing my job.

And here, in his final entry for our study, a professional tells us directly how valuable it was for him to fill out the diary questionnaire that we sent every day during his project:

I did find value in doing the questionnaires, especially when I was disciplined enough to do them at the end of the day, when everything was still fresh in my mind. It helped me to reflect on the day, my accomplishments, the team’s work, and how I was feeling in general. When you’re working at a hectic pace, reflection time is rare, but [it’s] really beneficial.

Don’t dismiss the idea of trying a work diary because you think you have to create finely-crafted entries for posterity. We’ve found that if you avoid making a big commitment to it, you’ll be more successful. Don’t worry about how to express yourself. Simply describe one event or insight from the day. In our study, the average length of the entries was a mere 54 words.

To get started:

• Pick a time. Consider when you’re most likely to have ten minutes to yourself. Ideally, this will be the same time each day, because it’s much easier to get into the habit that way. For some of us, that will be the very end of the day, just before bed. For others, it’s at the end of the workday, or on the train ride home.
• Create a memory trigger. Choose something you’ll see or hear at the designated writing time. For example, if you want to do the diary before you leave the office at 5:00, set a repeating alarm in your calendar for 4:50. If you choose bedtime, put your diary notebook and a pen on your bedside table.
• Select a medium. Find something you enjoy using. People have very different preferences for diarykeeping. Some love a leather-bound, monogrammed, silk-bookmarked, five-year diary, with just a few pre-ruled lines for each day. Others like online journaling programs (like iDoneThis). Whether it’s a Word doc, a note app, a spiral-bound notebook to an Excel spreadsheet, use whatever works for you.
• Reflect on your day. Some people discover what they think as they write, but most of us need a bit of time to collect our thoughts. Use the first three minutes to let your mind go to any one of these types of events from the day:
  • Progress . . . and what led to it. (Congratulate yourself!)
  • Setbacks . . . and what might have caused them. (Learn from them!)
  • Something good. (Feel grateful!)
  • Something difficult. (Get it off your chest!)
  • One thing you can do tomorrow to make your work go better. (Then plan how to do it!)
  • Anything else that dominates your reflection time.
• Write. Use the remaining seven minutes to jot down your thoughts. Don’t give a thought to grammar, proper sentence construction, style, etc. Focus on the event.
• Review. Once in a while, take a few minutes to sit down with your journal and a favorite beverage in a comfy chair. Much of the value in a diary comes from periodically reviewing the past few days (or more).

Keep a diary for just one project, for just a few weeks, and you might find it’s a productivity tool you don’t want to give up.

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Teresa Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. She researches what makes people creative, productive, happy, and motivated at work. Steven Kramer is a psychologist and independent researcher. They are coauthors of The Progress Principle (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011).