Poor man's productivity trick

Have you ever joined a large organization? One with a quarter million employees? Their process is fascinating. You receive hundreds of emails to set up different software. You get a machine mailed to you. Your badge comes from FedEx. The onboarding process is long and tedious. When you finally get an account set up, they direct you to Jira, where several other steps need to be completed before you can start working.

And when you start working for this Fortune 10 company, you'll notice that there is specialized software for everything. There are several vendors that maintain different applications and provide enterprise support. Some even have an office in the building to provide quick responses. We also have internal teams that build in-house tools to support other teams. I worked in such a team. My customers were my coworkers. It's fascinating.

So when you worked for a small startup, which I did after I was accidentally shown the door, you had to lower your expectations. The startup I joined had 4 employees, including me. I brought in my own laptop and we crammed into a 4-person cubicle in a sea of startups all trying to make it. Here we didn't have those fancy tools. We were frugal lean. If you have side projects, then I'm sure you've developed a way of tracking your own work.

At a startup where you have two developers (including me), a CEO and a salesman, you have the luxury of trying your own thing. Instead of Jira, Asana, or the myriad of productivity tools developers use, I came to embrace my own method. I started using what I call a Rolling Daily Work Tracker, or RDWT. Ok, let's just call it a rolling tracker.

A rolling tracker is just a text file. One ending in .txt, nothing fancy. Over time, I developed two versions of this method.

In version 1, every morning, as I started my day, I would open the file and write the current date on top. Next, throughout the day, as our client complained, I would write a single bullet point task that I needed to accomplish. For example, a client would say we wanted to add support for FedEx in our ecomm. I'd write the following:

2025-12-19:
    FashionNova 
        Jenny: Add support for Fedex

That's it. I would then go ahead and start working on that task. If I completed it, I would mark it with (fixed):

2025-12-19:
    FashionNova 
        Jenny: Add support for Fedex (fixed)

This being a startup, I rarely had a single task on a given day. This is what my file actually looked like:

2020-05-26:
    Internal:
        Kat:
            - Build webform for lumin. For cancel subscription, similar to Manscaped.
            - Why are we sending duplicate messages (see 27533478)
        Kevin:
            Build basic track order script for FabFitFun
        Hanna:
            Ew! What happened to the format here? (see 27918516)
    Thirdlove:
        Gio:
            Setup kustomer form
    Improvement:
        Add support for Memories in dynamic forms

This just looks like a text file where I keep track of my tasks. Why do I call it a rolling tracker? Because of what I did the next day.

The next day, I would open the file. Right on top I would add the current date, and all tasks that were not completed the previous day would roll over to the current day. So the file turned into something like this:

2020-05-27:
    Kat:
        - Build webform for lumin. For cancel subscription, similar to Manscaped.
    Improvement:
        Add support for Memories in dynamic forms

2020-05-26:
    Internal:
        Kat:
            - Build webform for lumin. For cancel subscription, similar to Manscaped.
            - Why are we sending duplicate messages (see 27533478) (fixed)
        Kevin:
            Build basic track order script for FabFitFun (fixed)
        Hanna:
            Ew! What happened to the format here? (see 27918516) (fixed)
    Thirdlove:
        Gio:
            Setup kustomer form (fixed)
    Improvement:
        Add support for Memories in dynamic forms

As the day progressed I would keep adding tasks to the top section. Everything that didn't get completed rolled over the next day. It became easy for me to search to see which task was completed. If anyone mentioned a problem, I could quickly search if I had encountered it in the past. As we started growing, this became a good way to discuss what I was working on in our daily standup.

After a year, our little team grew and grew. My file started to become too big to manage. So I came up with version two.

In version 2.0, I still followed the process of rolling over. But instead of keeping everything in one file, I would just keep each date in its own separate file. The only difference is that it looked less cluttered and since all the files resided in the same folder, search was still easy. I used the grep command to parse through all the files to find what I was looking for.

// Search tasks from Kevin in January 2021.
grep -i -A 3 "Kevin" ./2021.01*

I was able to work in this manner for 2 whole years. Keeping record of my tasks, and teaching new developers the same process. Some team members used Slack to keep track of their work, and found out the hard way that Slack caps your messages on the free plan. Of course we were on the free plan, but here you couldn't search for text that was more than 10,000 messages in the past. Yes, that used to be a thing.

Our company went from 4 employees to 35. We grew. New processes were put in place. Devs moved to Asana for tracking their work. I left the company.

When I work on my own side projects, I still use this method. It's a good way to keep granular details of my day-to-day work and see how it evolves over time. It might not work for you, but it is a good way to organize your work with the tools you have at your disposal. Yes, there are modern tools that integrate with AI, that can generate insights and metrics and whatnot. But sometimes, all we need is a text editor and a simple format to keep track of our work.

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