In most organizations, employees are required to fill timesheets every week so the company can track the amount of time that people have spent working on various projects and tasks.

My kids are in middle/high school and I’ve been looking for a timesheet-style solution that would help me understand their studying patterns and learn how much time they spend on various subjects.

There are quite a few apps available for time tracking but I was looking for something simple and Google Forms fit the bill perfectly. The multiple-choice grid question is handy for quickly marking the time that they have spent on various subjects. I also added a Linear scale question for them to self-evaluate their daily screen time on a relative scale.

Here’s how the final study log form looks like:

The Email Form Notifications add-on is enabled for this Google Form so parents get an instant email when the boys submit the study log form. The email contains all the form answers in a neatly formatted table. An instant push notification is sent on the mobile phone as well with IFTTT.

Google Forms write all the form responses in a Google Spreadsheet and that makes it even easier to analyze the study pattern visually. You can use one of the available charts or hit the “Explore” button in Google Sheets and ask questions in natural English about the answers stored in your spreadsheet.

For instance, you can say “Sum of Subjects [Physics] by Name last week” and it will instantly tell you the amount of time that each kid has spent on that subject last week. Or say “What percentage of Subjects [Physics] is not empty where name is Aryaman” to know the percentage of days when he touched a particular subject.

And because Google Forms work just fine on mobile devices, students can quickly fill the time log anywhere as long as they know the form’s URL.