Why Should You Keep a Personal Productivity Tracker?

Posted by David B. Wright

March 23, 2009

Most people don’t bother to keep a personal productivity tracker, also known as a career journal, but many highly successful people do.

What is a personal productivity tracker? Simply put, it’s an ongoing journal of your career accomplishments and how you performed in your job (s). It’s a useful tool both to keep you motivated and to be able to answer some of those tricky interview questions.

By simply documenting your accomplishments on a monthly or even weekly basis, you stay focused and motivated because (for one thing) you don’t want to put “nothing” for your monthly entry. By measuring your performance, you manage your performance more effectively and tend to achieve more of your goals, faster, and coach yourself to quantify your accomplishments.

For example, how many marketing campaigns did you manage last year? Which of them performed best, and why? By how much did profits increase when you took over as sales manager?

If you answer questions such as these correctly during the course of a a job interview, that high-paying dream job could be yours.

Here are a few tips:
Don’t depend on your memory. Start preparing for that interview now by keeping a detailed personal productivity tracker.
Keep track of each of the projects you work on, how they progress, and what results they achieve.
Be sure to include anything you do that leads directly to profits.
Note any other accomplishments, awards, press, recognition and accolades as well.

Then take that journal to your next interview. It will be far more detailed than your resume, but will help you position yourself to the interviewer as someone who gets results and accomplishes their goals. Without it, you risk appearing to be someone who just does the job, rather than the star you are.

If you were on the other side of the hiring process, whom would you choose? The well-prepared, organized person with details about acccomplishments in writing, or the poor soul without such an effective tool, who can’t give clear, quantified answers to questions about achievements?

To your success,

David B. Wright
Author, Get A Job! Your Guide to Making Successful Career Moves
www.thegetajobbook.com

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