Logging Hours of Activities Done

My first post to Pre-med Hell was a post about logging the hours of things you do in a day and did that for two weeks to show how much time you spend in certain areas and where you can cut the fat so to speak to increase efficiency in your day. I just updated and revised my curriculum vitae (CV) and one of the great ideas I brought up to other people and they agreed was to log the amount of hours that you did a specific activity. A few months back I posted an article that said about 80% of all applicants either lie on their application or over-exaggerate what they write. Also, take for example someone does an activity for 6 months and puts in 15 hours of work for their extra-curricular and another person puts in 150 hours in that six months. If the only thing you put on the CV is the years of activity done there could be a discrepancy with how much time you've actually put into the activity. The person that did 150 hours did a ten fold difference comparing to the first person.

I told myself months and months ago that I needed a better system to log the hours that I do specific activities because the one I had was really tedious and it came to the point where I just didn't want to do it anymore. I'm pretty certain there are some activities that I'm missing anywhere from 25-50 hours, which you all know is a lot of hours especially when you're working so hard to get everything you can.

Yesterday I came up with a better system. I set up an excel spreadsheet to give you the day that you did something, the date, what activity it was in the day, and, and the amount of hours you did in the day. I think it's important to have a description as well so you can remember what you did during that day if you need too. Then the outlines of the sheet total up the hours you spent during each day and during each week. During the day will log all the activities and during the week will log a specific activity throughout the week. I thought about putting time the activity was done but I didn't have enough room and I realized that a year later it doesn't really matter what time you did something, not for a CV or a resume. The cells may seem a little small but they provide the max amount of space for the font that its at and to be able to print on to one page.

Of course this won't matter as much if you're a senior on your last semester but if you're a freshman or sophomore, and this is something you want to do, it could help a lot. What I'm going to do is make 52 of these files in a folder and change the dates on all of them before the semester starts so when the semester comes it's not tedious at all, just type a number for the hours, and a description if I'm up to it. All numbers will round to one decimal place, because why do you need 3.56 hours? I don't log minutes because jokingly that would be borderline OCD and not joking it's just too many numbers to deal with. There's only 24 hours in a day, it's easier to work with.

You're more than welcome to use it, that's why I'm making it available to you. I hope it helps and I hope you're able to log better than I did for the last 3 years. All you have to do is change the dates and the activities that you do each week.

Logging Hours Spreadsheet (.xlxs)

• Click the link, go to "File" and go to "Download Original"