Your Short Guide to Daily Activity Log

A daily activity log is an easy way to record your day-to-day work and tasks. It’s also one of the best and simplest time management techniques. But many people either don’t know how to use it, what to do with it, or what types of activities to include.

While you can have the best apps and tools to harness, not knowing how to record your activities can lower your productivity and make using a daily activity log harder.

Find out what is a daily activity log, how to use it right, and check helpful tools in our short guide.

What Is Daily Activity Log?

Daily activity log is a written record of the tasks you do every day. Usually, it includes such items as date, day, time, and name of the activity. And it can have different variants—a simple timesheet, a more advanced report, a graphical form, or even a calendar.

So what are considered daily activities in a daily log? It can be anything you find worth including. Beginning from daily to-dos, employee time, and tasks you do at work to errands, house chores, and personal activities.

A daily activity log is a history and account of how you spend your time. And that can help you become more aware of your life and improve your productivity.

Why Use Daily Activity Log?

Daily activity log can astronomically improve your time management, and here’s how:

• It helps to understand how you work, spend your day, and where your time goes—it’s one of the best tools that can help you see what your daily life looks like.

• You can discover and understand unproductive activities, bad habits, and certain tasks that drain your energy levels.

• If needed, you or the company can share it with others so clients, customers, and team members can easily view your availability, style of work, accessibility, and workload. Using a cloud contact center can further enhance this transparency by integrating communication logs directly with daily activity tracking, offering a seamless way to manage customer interactions alongside other tasks.

• Daily activity log helps to review your work and evaluate outcomes.

• It’s a means to check on your productivity for better time management and to achieve a healthy work-life balance.

• It can help find certain behavior patterns in your work activity, discover weaknesses, and draw conclusions to be more effective.

When you use an activity log consistently, you can better your work to offer a more satisfactory service to your clients, either as a company or as an individual.

How to Create a Daily Activity Log?

How to track your daily activities to be effective, and what to include in your log? There are many ways in which you can efficiently track your time with an activity log. And the easiest is by using pen and paper.

You simply create a table with columns and column headers. The time record can comprise everything that you find useful. But the most common items include project, task, date, start and stop time, job description, total hours spent, and additional notes.

Also, you can use your calendar as a source of historical logs and work with it at the same time to plan your goals ahead.

However, the most convenient form of logging activities is to use a time tracking software. It automatically tracks the duration of your activities and generates data-rich reports so you can stay focused on your work.

The Best Daily Activity Log Apps

You can opt for the traditional use with a journal, calendar, or pen and paper.

But if you have a lot on your plate, a daily activity log software will save time and money. Here are the best apps to help you keep track of daily activities.

1. TimeCamp

Best for: automatic time tracking for logging billable hours

TimeCamp is an intuitive time tracking software that automatically logs your hours. Its advanced features allow you to improve productivity, profitability, and be more accountable.

TimeCamp lets you stay focused on your work while it gathers all the data in one place. You can use the app solo or with your team to find weak spots in your work and help you improve teamwork.

Main features:

• One-click time tracker that automatically logs your hours

• The distinction between core and non-core activities

• Logging billable and non-billable hours

• Rich timesheet management with many features—day, week, and calendar timesheet

• Graphical timesheet to visualize your activity log

• You can edit time entries manually to better adjust your activity log

• Time-off and attendance tracking

• Keyword-based tracking for easier logging and reporting

• Integration with Google Calendar to help you log all your events

Pricing

• Free – a free plan of TimeCamp for unlimited users includes all the essentials – accurate time tracking, unlimited projects, a time clock kiosk, desktop, and mobile apps, idle time detection, and many more,
• Starter – $2.99 per user per month, including unlimited tasks, excel reports export, attendance, time-off, overtime tracking (billed annually)
• Premium – $4.99 per user per month, including one integrations, billable time, budget & estimates, apps & websites tracking, project archiving, and more (billed annually),
• Ultimate – $7.99 per user per month, including unlimited integrations, billable rates, labor costs, invoicing, timesheet approvals, custom user roles, and more (billed annually)

Enterprise – custom pricing; contact sales team for more details

2. Daily

Best for: tracking daily activities on Apple devices

Daily is a simple and user-friendly daily activity log app for Mac. It helps to track time not by using timers, but by occasionally asking what you’re working on.

It comprises basic features that make it easy to track work activity. You can use it solo or within your organization.

Main features:

• Timesheets for a specific day, week, month, and year allow you to view all data ever recorded

• Manage activities by adding, deleting, renaming, hiding, merging, and grouping

• View and export timesheets to create invoices and report hours

• You can schedule when to track time

Pricing: Daily is free to try for 7 days. Then, you can choose from three pricing options: monthly at $3.99, annually at $29.99, or lifetime at $59.99.

3. Apploye

Best for: logging daily activities on-site

Apploye is a suitable log app for employees working outside of the office. It gives desk, remote, and mobile teams easy access to important work at the same time in one place.

Apploye features provide you and your team with a daily log app and means to efficiently manage your business.

Main features:

• Daily, weekly, monthly, and custom timesheets with approvals

• Clocking in and out from the desktop or mobile app

• You can track the productivity of remote staff and contractors

• Time tracker with GPS to track the location of field service

• Live feed with the daily activity of team members

• Basic performance metrics

Picing: Apploye is free for ten days. Then you can choose from different pricing plans: $4 per user/month, Standard at $5 per user/month, Premium at $6 per user/month, or Elite at $7 per user/month

4. Timenotes

Best for: visualizing work progress for teams

Timenotes is a more advanced management tool. As a daily activity log app, it can help you track your tasks and give you an idea of how people in your company manage their work.

This log app can help follow and analyze the progress of important work on a daily basis.

Main features:

• Time logs report with activities and project

• Track activities with browser extension (for Windows, Mac, and Linux), or mobile app (Android, iOS)

• Export reports to PDF, Excel or CSV format

• Simple project management

• Absence tracking

Pricing: Timenotes offers a 30-day free trial. Pricing varies between plans: Solo Plan at $39 per year, Small Team at $6.99/month, Unlimited Monthly at $69/month, and Unlimited—Annual at $57.50/month.

5. TimeOwl

Best for: tracking work activity within your calendar

TimeOwl is a minimalistic log app that uses a generic calendar as the database for tracking your time.

Plugins to Google Sheets and Google Calendar make it a great solution for users of Google Drive. It allows you to store and manage all your work progress online, in one place.

Main features:

• Hashtags serve as items to be tracked in your calendar

• Reports with project usage, resource consumption, and project status

• Ability to export reports

• Setting and tracking a budget

• In-calendar reports—TimeOwl creates additional calendar entries within your calendar so you can see how you’re spending your time

Pricing: TimeOwl is a free app.

6. focus booster

Best for: tracking daily activity with the Pomodoro technique

focus booster is a simple log app that lets you track time with the famous Pomodoro technique.

It’s a perfect app if you’re looking for a plain timer to track activities in 25-minute intervals to see how much time you’re spending on certain tasks.

Main features:

• A to-do list

• Simple time tracking with a minimalistic timer

• Light and dark modes

• Basic reports with the name of the job, date, client, or label

• Simple timesheets

• You can see your productivity, review and analyze each day in a neat dashboard that visualizes all data

• Available online, for desktop (Windows, Mac), and as a mobile app

Pricing: The free version of the focus booster includes 20 Pomodoro sessions per month, simple time tracking, and productivity reporting. Or you can choose a professional plan at $4.99.

7. Timely

Best for: minimalistic activity log for tracking time online

Timely is a time tracking app with automatic features that help improve work management. It tracks how much time you spend on all your activities throughout the day.

Although Timely is a powerful daily activity log app, at times, it may come with too much information that doesn’t exactly account for what you need to include in your daily report. Thus, it’s best for the most demanding customer.

Main features:

• You don’t have to start tracking time for each activity, Timely detects all your tasks

• Time log report captures every process in your report while working in the background

• Planning tool within the log app allows you to better schedule every task

• Apps available for a computer as a desktop app and for mobile devices

• Numerous integrations with other apps

Pricing: Starter at $11 per user/month; Premium at $20 per user/month; Unlimited at $28 per user/month; or Unlimited + with custom pricing and features

Daily Activity Log Template

If you’re not a fan of technological solutions, need additional aid in tracking your productivity, or prefer a traditional pen-and-paper method, you can choose from various templates.

Just like an app, the template can help you see how much time you spend on every activity and keep all the time records organized.

Check out our templates that will help you track your productivity on a daily basis:

• 👉 The Best Weekly Schedule Templates That Will Help You Organize Time

• 👉 12 Daily Schedule Template Ideas

How to Successfully Keep Daily Activity Log?

To make sure you benefit from recording your daily activities, you need to do it in a smart way.

Here are a few tips to help you better organize the process of recording and managing your day:

• Be consistent and update regularly—establish a routine for logging every task so in time, it’ll become a habit

• Keep it simple—don’t note all the details not to get confused or waste time on filling in your timesheet

• Analyze and revise to ensure you’re using the log for the right purpose

• Use automatic tools—the daily activity log app can save you a lot of time on manually entering each task

• Ensure easy access to your log so you can regularly update the data

And remember to monitor your energy levels so keeping an activity log doesn’t turn into torture.

Conclusion

John C. Maxwell said that “the secret of your success is determined by your daily agenda. (…) You will never change your life until you change something you do daily.”

A good daily activity log app can help you save time, money, and improve productivity. As a result, you’ll lead a well-balanced, happy work and personal life.

Kate Borucka Kate is a freelance translator, copywriter, and a content writer specializing in time tracking software, time management, and productivity. When not researching new software, she's reading books, or spending time outdoors.