Recently, I have been trying to optimize the way I spent my day and keep track of my daily schedule. I have experimented with different techniques like just writing a set of TODOs as soon I start my day in a text editor. Then I try to mark them as done once the task is completed. It worked for me most of the days but there are days when I just feel like I am exhausted doing a lot of work. But at the end of the day I would mostly have spent my time in meetings or got stuck at a particular task. There will also be days I would be overwhelmed by the number of tasks and start to procrastinate. This would mostly happen on weekends.

Some days ago, I tweaked the technique mentioned in the nevblog blog and found myself being on track everyday. Below is the sample TODO list

I update the schedule column every hour about what I did that hour. So far this hack with paper and pen has worked for me the best. It is just keeping a TODO list in a scratchpad with hourly schedule on the right side of the sheet. It clearly shows how much progress I am making at a particular point of time in a day. Additional to the TODO list and the schedule, I write a summary of the day at the bottom. It just gives so much clarity on what I was doing all day and how I can improve on. If you are looking for a TODO list hack give it a try.