Printable CEO Actually Helps Me Be Productive

Hot damn!

At someone's Twitter recommendation (I apologize, I cannot for the life of me remember who it was John Hoffoss!), I've been trying out some of Dave Seah's Printable CEO time and task management tools. (I briefly met Dave Seah at the BlogHer meetup at SXSW '07.)

I was slightly skeptical because... well, it's my own ability to be productive at all that I sometimes doubt. I've sort of investigated a few online solutions. I didn't want to spend money for something I wasn't sure about. It would be my personal bucks used for work-related things. And I have so many work-related projects that free versions of paid products aren't sufficient to manage them all.

I wasn't convinced that an online solution was the way to go, either. Since I do pretty much all my work on a computer, I think that my brain does go into this zone when I look at my computer. It's hard to break out of that haze of task completion and make my brain move in the different direction required to organize.

I just had a flashback. When I moved from Production into Validations, one of the first things my then-manager insisted on was that I get a Franklin-Covey planner. I did, and I haven't touched it once.

The one Printable CEO tool that I've really settled in with is the Emergent Task Planner. I don't integrate it with the other tools the way it's designed to be used. I don't need it as a project management tool, just a task management tool. So I have no need to tie it in to higher-level organization or goals.

I like having a limit on the number of tasks I can add to it. It forces me to focus on what's most immediate and keeps me from getting overwhelmed.

I like having space for notes. It's a temporary holding pen for thoughts and information, all in one place. So when I start a new sheet for the next day I can discard what I wrote if I finished the task or carry over the info I still need to finish something.

To my surprise, I like the time tracking. We have to report our time at work, but nothing's billable per se so I didn't used to pay too much attention to it. I've found it motivating to be able to fill out my time sheets more accurately and I now record daily instead of weekly. It helps me to know exactly how much time I spend on certain activities so I can plan more accurately in the future. It helps me see that I did, indeed, get some work done in a day.

The other item I've used is the Task Order Up. Having all the orders up gives me a better sense of just how big my overall workload is. I put them up right before I went on vacation, and I think my boss was kind of like "what the heck is this?" and probably had a peek at 'em. I still like my post-it status board for higher-level project status tracking and my post-it calendar for timing. The number of post-its on the status board does already give me some sense of workload, but not all my projects fit quite so neatly into those buckets.

So big thanks to whoever you are on Twitter for suggesting it and big thanks to Dave Seah for creating such a nifty and simple product. The fact that it's so easy to use shows that it clearly has a lot of thought behind id.