How do you quantify your work?

Originally Posted by Shorty

While I was in school, how much actual *work* I did while the school semester was going on depended on how "booked" my calendar would look like. I'd have a monthly calendar with various different colored pen markings for different classes, and each assigment due date. A line with the respective color for that class or assignment would be drawn for the number of days I estimated that I should work on.

When those lines overlapped 3-4 times over a period of certain amount of days, I knew I was in for a pretty good workload.

Today (recently), I quantify my workload at the office with the number of emails I get / send out during the day. On a normal day, I'd get about 30 emails from my customers total, 10 total or so from vendors. A good chunck of them turn out to be "thanks" or "confirmed" type emails, so it's not a whole big deal to action on them. On a normal day, I'd say my email output is roughly 5-8 per hour. So by the end of the day if I'd sent 60 emails between 9AM-5PM, that's scaling at what I'd consider just only slightly beyond my "normal" workload.

I normally go to work between 8-9AM, usually I'll try to be there before 8:40 at the latest. I've been going home at 7~8PM lately, and the number / times I've sent my emails to vendors / to customers are there as proof for the amount of work I've been doing. I scored 100 sent emails a couple nights ago when I went home at 9 (this to me, is bordering insanity).

So before I lose my head talking about this ( ) how do you scale / measure your workload?

I'm gonna try the line thing, seems like a pretty good method!

I tend to just write notes all the time. I have an academic diary, and each day I write a list of the things I need to do with a little tick box next to it. If I don't do it, I write it up on the next page for the next day. I tend to finish all work on the weekend that I haven't done during the week.

I also have post-it notes of any major assignments that I need to do. I stick them on the wall in front of my laptop to keep reminding me I should do something about it.

Jam it back in, in the dark.