Daily Log of Tasks

How To

For a log to be effective it should provide on a daily basis:

1. Write down tasks done
2. Have comments on important learnings
3. Provide links to all work product that took more than 15 minutes to complete
4. Do this on a running basis to allow the log to serve as a monitor of progress that other team members can use to facilitate coordination on a sub-hour timescale

On a weekly basis - the Log should provide a Weekly Assessment- including Planning and Review:

1. At the beginning of the week, list your goals for the week
2. At the end of the week, assess:
   1. Did you meet your milestones?
   2. If not, why not, and how you can do better?

Explanation of Daily Log

The purpose of the Daily Log is to facilitate organizational learning and performance management by promoting feedback, assessment, and transparency. The Daily Log is required for people at Factor e Farm.

A Log allows others to access quick links to review work - which is highly relevant when working on a distributed team where many people provide feedback.

When people log their work - this work can be evaluated and assessed for efficiency, direction, and prioritization. Without a task log, it is not possible to evaluate and learn about what a person is doing.

Further, OSE is an organization that incubates other OSE Incubators. For organizational learning across these Incubators and other OSE Chapters, it is important to document what people are doing to clarify expectations/process/etc.

Further, the weekly Log serves as the basis for Monthly Planning and Review:

1. What were the major milestones reached?
2. What were the major milestones missed?
3. What did you learn this month?
4. What could you have done better?
5. What are your milestones for next month?

See sample Daily Log - Marcin Blog

Comments

From Colby: Have a process where people set their own goals and timeline and present them to the group and file them on a wiki. Then meet weekly and have them add a status update with what they accomplished over the week (or even daily).

Each month, have them present to the group the summary of their accomplishments each week, lessons learned, how they are on schedule, what "unplanned items" came up that delayed the schedule.

Keep track over time, the number of weeks in which they hit their own goals and didn't. Offer each time they don't hit their goals that they can come for you for advice.

The same thing applies to under and over budget, etc.

Once a month or week, take part of a day and sit down with each person for 10-15 minutes to discuss what is going well and isn't... and look at their progress reports and schedule.

Execution

Make it really simple.

1. Log tasks in an ongoing fashion.
2. Week plan due Monday: what do you intend to do this week (in your own words)
3. What did you in fact do this week? What unplanned items?
4. What is your own assessment of that / your progress?

1. Share it with each other - over Sunday dinner?
2. Sharing it means, if you didn't do it, you at least have to think about it while being shared.
3. You want to write things down, because then it'll be hard to think of things you did, and it'll look to the group like you didn't do anything.