DonationCoder.com Software > The Getting Organized Experiment of 2009

Something I want to try this Year.. Daily After-action Reports

(1/3) > >>

mouser:
I was thinking that one thing i would really like to start doing this year is to prepare a kind of one page "after-action" report form that i would fill out after each day, to record what i did each day.
I think it would help ensure I am making good use of my time.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, one thing i suspect might be important is to set aside some time at the end of each day to fill it out, rather than writing it as the day goes on.  I think filling it out at the end of the day would make it more useful as a contemplative experience -- rather than a mindless log of minutia.

Thoughts? Anyone already do this? Any suggestions for what the form would look like?

mnemonic:
I do a very similar thing at work on a weekly basis.

Although I work within a team, the majority of my work is fairly autonomous and I'm left alone to do whatever I need to do (I'm a functional analyst within a software development team).  As a result, I can often go for several days without needing to talk to my boss about work.

All I have is a very loose template that I use inside an email, based around RAID (risks, actions, issues and dependencies):

Project name

* Progress this week
* Risks that have arisen during the week and what needs to be done to mitigate them
* Issues split into two - ones that I'm progressing and those that need escalating or need work requests for other teams
* Work that I've passed on to developers and any responses that they have come back with
* Actions that I need to take over the next week or in the future
* Actions that I'm waiting for other people to complete
This works really well for a number of reasons:

* Allows me to review everything I've done
* Acts as a motivator, as the report is effectively a contract describing the work I need to do
* Allows other people to go to one place to see the actions, issues and risks of a certain project
* Is an effective way of preparing for six-monthly appraisals
During the week, I keep a mammoth, fairly free-format todo.txt file that helps me to remember everything:

***************
DD/MM/YYYY
[] Todo
() Waiting for
[x ] Todo completed
* Information
** Related information
* M: MEETING NAME (Participants)
** meeting text
** meeting text
* M: ---
* D: DOCUMENT REVIEW (document name)
** document details
* D: ---
* P: MULTI-ACTION TODO NAME
** [] Todo that needs doing
** [na] Todo that cannot be done until another todo is completed
* P: ---
****************

Each day, I review all my notes from the previous day, from the day a week before, one month ago, three months ago and 6 months ago.  This helps me to review my actions to add to the report and also allows me to review any important information.

The system does have a few issues though:

* If I have no motivation to do them, todos can hang around for ages
* It takes time to review each day
* Complex notes can take ages to type
* This type of system means that everything has to go into the todo.txt, otherwise I can never trust it
* Things go out-of-date and where a decision has been made and then changed, it's difficult to work out what's correct.  This could be fixed by tags and the search function, but consistently tagging is hard as I can never remember the tags that I've used

mouser:
Nice.

One thing that needs to be said for what i am interested in -- i'm not actually very interested in ever looking at these reports after i write them -- they aren't meant to document something or serve as a lasting record.

Basically i'm thinking of this more as a way of forcing myself to take each day more seriously, and force myself to spend a bit of time at the end of each day asking myself how well i spent the day.

mnemonic:
I guess it's the same kind of thing.  The difference is that you're looking for accountability to yourself.

The issue with all of these kind of things is that you have a bad day and you suddenly fall-off the documentation.  I've tried so many different systems and fallen-off of them over time...every time a new one comes out (GTD, Mark Forster's Do It Tomorrow and Autofocus etc.), I'm proclaiming that they're the bees-knees and I've fallen-off a week later (just like text editors, where I've loved them for a week and then unceremoniously dumped them).

When I wrote up my PhD years ago I could go for days without even looking at it, but these kinds of contracts with yourself could come in useful.

Out of all the tips I've seen, one thing has stood out.  It's based on Mark Forster's Do It Tomorrow.  Basically, write a list of actions each evening that creates a contract with yourself for the next day.  The idea is that you work on each and every todo on the list, even if you only do 5 minutes on each one (you can set a timer) and then cross it off and enter it on to the next day's list.  Sometimes that will last 5 minutes, but often you'll spend an hour doing the todo, as the hard part is often getting started.

app103:
You know, this was one of the original purposes of Twitter. And there was an application that would pop up on your screen once an hour asking you "what are you doing?" in which you would quickly type it in, in 140 chars or less, what you were doing at that moment.

Maybe a more private text file based version of this would be a good idea. I think rather than the actual log being useful, it would serve as a tool making you more aware of how you are spending your time, as you are doing whatever it is that you are doing.

Of course the logs could serve as a sort of daily diary, too.

The main difference with Twitter would be that it would be 100% private, on your own pc, and not subject to their "fail whale" periods of down time.

Where it would fall short, would be that we aren't always at our PC's and you wouldn't be able to answer the beep while out shopping or doing other things.

I know you stated that you didn't want to do it as the day progressed, but having that log to review at the end of the day when you started to think about how you spent your time might be a powerful thing. And since it's only once an hour reports, and they are very short, it wouldn't be all that time consuming to review it.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page