Work Log Template : Track & Schedule Daily Log, Weekly and Monthly

by Elina D

What Is A Work Log?

Over the course of an average day, most people work on many different tasks (both personal and professional) simultaneously. To accurately calculate how many hours were needed to complete a certain task, a work log needs to fill in by each team member.

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Daily Schedule Template Excel

Knowing where you spend your time in your day-to-day life is the starting point in becoming organized. This daily schedule template will allow you to track your daily tasks and get a high-level view of where you are spending most of your time.

Specification: A basic work log specifies when the employee started to work on a task (date & exact hour) and stopped (date & exact hour). Subtracting the start from the end will result in the number of hours spent on any task and when.
Other details may be added to this basic information of Work Log, for example, the hours which were initially allocated for completing this task, the percentage of a certain time period that this task required from the employee, etc.

Why Do You Need A Work Log?

Maintaining a work log has many benefits –

  • Assists In Planning - Calculating how many hours were needed to complete a certain task can help estimate the required time needed for a similar future task.
  • Assists In Billing - Knowing how many hours were spent on a task can help in pricing future tasks for clients, internal budgeting, or bids for third-party vendors.
  • Assists In Comparing Employees - If two or more team members perform the same task, a log can easily compare their efficiency. This factor, along with the quality of their work, can compare their effectiveness.
  • Gross vs. Net-Keeping a log can help an employee (or anyone else in their organization) calculate which percentage of their workday was allocated to any specific task. For example, Eugene required an entire workday (9 hours) to complete a task. His work log showed that he worked for 4.5 hours on this specific task and didn’t have any other entries in his log on that day. Dividing 4.5 by 9 will show that he spent 50% of his workday on that task, and the rest of his workday was used for other non-work-related activities.
  • Project Evaluation - Combining all the employees involved in a certain project can assist in evaluating its profitability post-completion. This can help in ascertaining whether to perform similar projects in the future.
  • For General Bookkeeping Sake - Keeping a log can help at any point in the future when the owner of the log wants to remind themselves which tasks they completed and how much time it took them.

Daily Log

Daily Log, Work Log Template, work log

Daily Log

The most detailed log, which sometimes contains an hourly account of the tasks performed on any given day. It can be easily summarized and analyzed, but it will be difficult to add up any task that took more than a day to complete.

Here are some features of the Daily Work Log Excel Template. It allows users to record up to 25 tasks daily. The excel log captures the time, description, task type, time spent, and comments on each of the tasks. The log allows up to 5 different task types.

The typical task types can be Meetings, Project Work, Claims Processing, Data Entry, etc. Displays the total time spent for today and the breakdown of the time spent on each task type. One-click button to create a fresh new log every day. Validates to ensure there is no duplicate worksheet for the same day.

Task Management Pack

Weekly Work Log Word Template

The most popular type, since most people easily remember what they’ve worked on in the past week, isn’t too tedious to update once a week. This type of log is also easy for a supervisor to review and approve since it takes a few minutes to do so and can help evaluate an employees’ performance.

For example: On 21-Aug worked on analyzing a work plan for 3.5 hrs and 4 hrs on writing a report on lessons learned for the project, which ended last week. On 22-Aug worked on preparing tutorials for the new employees for 8 hrs and so on for the rest of the workdays in that week.

Monthly Work Log

This type of log is more of an overview of the work performed during a month and typically shows the number of hours worked each day and on which project. If the employee worked on one project only, it could specify which high-level task they worked on.

For example, 21-Aug: Interface Testing; 22-Aug: Script Evaluation, etc. This log can also be compiled using 4-5 weekly logs but a higher level of detail.


You may also be interested in reading the 9/80 Work Schedule

Task Management Pack