Have you ever wondered about the time you spend at your workplace that does not at all contribute to any productivity desired and demanded by your firm? Honestly, you cannot say that you’ve never wasted any time! If you go through your activity log, you will be surprised to see the exact amount of time you worked. It will also help in eliminating the activities that distract you or eat up your time that does not add to your productivity. You can be more productive in completing your tasks and leave on time.
Maintaining a log for all the activities can benefit you in diverse ways. In this article, we will be discussing everything about it, so let us get into it.
What are Activity Logs?
Activity logs are written records of how you spend your time during your working hours. It is maintained and monitored from time to time to track your productivity.
All you need to do is observe your work pattern for a few days, and you will have exact data regarding your time management, total working hours, idle hours, etc that will help you boost-up your working capacity.
Activity logs help you understand the right time of the day when you are more energetic and productive so that you can finish off all your important tasks during that time.
Talking about the less-productive hours, it includes unnecessary web surfing or taking too much time to surf the web, getting a coffee amidst the task, too many washrooms breaks, distractions during the break, unavoidable calls, etc. The activity logs provide you with the details regarding the unproductive time. You can cover it by eliminating such activities as much as possible.
How Can You Maintain An Activity Log?
Before you begin with maintaining activity logs, you will have to download a template for it, or you can use a spreadsheet and fill it up with these headers-
Activity details
Time and Date
The Duration
Remarks about what you feel
The Assessment being low, medium, or high
Then, without any specific changes and alternation in your work behavior, just do your work normally and fill up the above details.
Every time to complete your task and move on to the next one, note it down. Whenever you take a break or chit-chat with your colleagues over a coffee and how you feel- fatigued, exhausted, burned out, energetic, super productive, etc. note it down.
And in the end, evaluate your spreadsheet if it is a low or high-value working day. This way, you can observe your work pattern for a few days and make the necessary changes later.
Well, noting down everything and every time can be hectic, and there is a possibility that you might sometimes forget to note your activities. After all, to err is human, to rectify divine!
Therefore, stationing an employee monitoring software can be beneficial for both the employers and employees, to keep a track of total productive and unproductive hours. The question is how to choose the right software as the market is crowded with so many options. How to make a confident selection and invest smartly at the same time?
Call me a benefactor for researching, so that I could suggest to you the four best time-tracking software and also these are some of the widely used-software, hence can be trusted.
Time Doctor
InterGuard
ActivTrak
These tools are super helpful in tracking an employee's working time and idle hours loaded with many features like-
Keystroke monitoring
Productive hours tracking
Tracking malicious activities (like insider threats)
Shift management
Provides role-based access
Get real-time screen monitoring
Provides details regarding the most used websites, internet history, download history, etc
And the list does not end here! These are complete employee surveillance tools.
How To Study Your Activity Log?
Observe your time-data for a few days and make a note of the unnecessary wastage of time, try to avoid it in the future
Shift the most important tasks at the time when you are highly productive
Prioritize your work in descending order, meaning from the most important to the least
Decrease the number of hours you spend on personal tasks.
Wrapping Up!
The activity log is an important tool to manage and maintain the productivity of employees during their work hours. But do not confuse it with timesheets, these are used for providing details of your time spent on a task/job, unlike timesheets which are used for maintaining attendance.
