Every applicant ends up tracking their activities somewhere. The question is where, and whether that system survives contact with a busy semester. Here's an honest rundown of the methods people actually use, including where each one holds up and where it tends to fall apart.
The notes app
The lowest-friction option is whatever notes app is already on your phone. You open it, type a line, done. The upside is speed - nothing beats it for capturing a thought in the moment. The downside is structure: a running list of notes has no categories, no hour totals, and no way to search by activity six months later without scrolling through everything else in your phone's notes. It works as a capture tool, badly as a system of record.
Google Sheets or Excel
A spreadsheet is the step up most applicants take once a notes app gets unwieldy. You get real structure: columns, formulas, running totals by category. It's free and completely customizable. The catch is that the structure only holds if you maintain it yourself, and the spreadsheet is rarely open at the moment you'd actually log something - right after a shift, a meeting, or a shadowing session. We go deeper on this specific comparison in Prefolio vs. Google Sheets and, for the pre-med case specifically, Prefolio vs. a spreadsheet.
Notion
Notion sits between a spreadsheet and a full app - databases, tags, linked views, and enough flexibility to build something genuinely good. The tradeoff is setup time: a Notion tracker worth using takes real work to build, and most templates you can copy don't fit your exact application cycle without editing. We cover this tradeoff in detail in Prefolio vs. Notion for grad school tracking.
A physical planner or journal
Some applicants prefer pen and paper, and there's a real case for it: no notifications, no app fatigue, and handwriting can make reflection feel less like a chore. The obvious limit is that a paper log can't total your hours automatically, can't remind you to log, and turns into a slow, manual retyping project when you actually need to pull that history into an application. It's a fine reflection tool, a weak system of record.
A dedicated tracking app
Purpose-built apps trade flexibility for structure that's already decided for you. That's a real tradeoff - you can't reshape the categories the way you can in Sheets or Notion - but it removes the maintenance burden entirely. Prefolio, for example, asks for the details that actually matter for an application (date, hours, category, a short reflection) in a format built for logging on your phone right after something happens, and it uses that record later to draft AMCAS entries, resume bullets, or essay material grounded in what you actually did. See how the AI drafting works if you want the specifics.
What actually determines which one works for you
Two questions matter more than the feature list:
- Will you actually open it in the moment? The best system on paper is worthless if it lives somewhere you don't check right after the activity happens. This is the single biggest predictor of whether a tracker survives past the first month.
- What do you need the data to become later? If you just need a running hour total, almost any of these work. If you need that record to turn into a personal statement, AMCAS entries, or a fellowship essay months from now, the tool that helps with the translation step saves real time when you're under deadline pressure.
Our honest take
If you already have a system that's survived a full semester without gaps, keep using it - switching tools has its own cost. If you've started and abandoned two or three trackers already, the pattern usually isn't a discipline problem, it's a friction problem, and that's specifically what a dedicated app is built to remove. Try our free clinical & volunteer hours calculator or AMCAS character counter to see the difference between a raw log and application-ready material, no account needed.