Work from home fridays - start a work diary

I love office supplies. When I landed this new job three months ago, I was SO EXCITED to go hunting for a day planner. In school, I had a red moleskine planner with blank, lined pages, and it was seriously a life saver, allowing me to keep notes, sketches, timelines, and other little things right next to my weekly calendar.

I basically bought the same planner when I started my new job, and it's been a life saver when it comes to keeping me on track with home life, photography, church, social events, and work - in which one day a week, I'm working from home.

However, with the blank, lined pages, I'm making a point of reserving those for journaling about work.

When you work from home, you need to really be on top of things to stay organized. By keeping a work diary, I'm able to write about my week and what's been going on at work. I write about anything work-related from ongoing project updates, to new things I learn about my coworkers.

Not only does this help me remember what happened during the week when I'm away from the office and trying to recall certain things from home, but it's also a record of my career from the very first day I started work as an employed creative professional.

TOOLS I USE TO KEEP A WORK DIARY

01 | MAP KEY
In the front of my day planner, I have abbreviations for certain areas of my life that I need to keep track of and I've assigned a color to each abbreviation. This allows me to have flexibility in my notes. For instance, the letter 'H,' underlined and written in pink, signifies home & personal life. That means, anytime I'm writing about a personal appointment, a task to be completed at home, or a personal social event, the actual entry gets recorded in pink, or I write the entry in black or blue ink, but underline or box it in pink.

02 | STICKY NOTES
I have a lined, sticky note pad that I sometimes stick over my journal page for the week. This is helpful if I have extra journaling, or if there's extra tasks I need to complete that didn't fit on my weekly agenda side. I like the fact that they're sticky notes because I can easily flip it up to see what's written behind it, on the actual day planner page.

03 | PAPER CLIPS
I like to keep all my appointments on the 'Month at a Glance' page, so I use a large, colorful paper clip to make it easy to access the current month quickly, so I'm not having to constantly flip through my day planner looking for the correct page.

Do you keep a work diary? If so, how long have you been journaling your career?