How did it start? Why is it useful?

When I worked at Microsoft, we used to have annual reviews, as most other corporations around the world do. Until the company streamlined the process, writing your self-evaluation took significant time. If, in addition to your own, you had to write reviews for each person on the team you managed, this ended up being a lot of work. Back than, I used to keep an email folder with notes-to-self about various highlights and lowlights during the software development cycle.

Ever since I founded Lumen Spark, of course I don’t have to evaluate my performance on annual basis. Great! Except now, I feel like I need to evaluate my performance of monthly or weekly basis. After all, the success of the company depends on far fewer people than when I worked at MS. Plus, I actually want to evaluate my performance more than ever before.

So I started taking weekly notes. Those are very brief – I spend less than 15 minutes to capture bullet points of the key highlights & lowlights. Each list entry corresponds to one week. The great thing about lists in Daily Tracker is that you can color code list entries. So for instance, you could use green bullet to mark the week as fantastic and red if it wasn’t so great. You can easily sort lists by date or by color bullets and thus quickly remind yourself of the highlights in the recent months. And of course, you can sync your notes to Google Docs and thus make them available on your desktop, in case for example, you find yourself having to write your annual review.

Why do it using Daily Tracker? Well, for one thing, you have your iPhone with you anywhere you go. And unlike email, you can quickly edit any note without having to resend it. Just a simple tool to help us be more productive and free the necessary time for all the fun things in life (insert your favorite thing here).

What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Have a great day!
-Christoph

PS: Here’s a page with details how to create lists in Daily Tracker.

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