This weekend I set aside the time to make a 4 by 6 inch version of the Emergent Task Planner. Working from the half-sized version of the ETP, which already makes serious compromises, I had to somehow squeeze all the old elements into a much smaller space. Here’s what it looks like:
The left side shows the half-sized ETP overlaid on the 4×6″ template. The right size shows the resized version. I had to make several more adjustments, and ended up redrawing most of the form.
Challenges
I started shrinking the A5 design, as that design went through a group test to find the smallest size I could make things. However, for the ETP to be useful for a day of planning, I needed at least 12 hours visible. That wasn’t going to happen with the existing day grid. So, I simplified it by shrinking the hour boxes and eliminating the 15-minute boxes of the original. The resulting design can show 19 hours, which two lines of planning per hour. This means that the level of detail you can record is lessened, but I think that isn’t going to matter much for the way I imagine this will be used.
I got rid of the secondary line of 15-minute boxes, sticking only with the hour boxes. Half hours are designated by the dashed lines. There’s not a lot of room here to write things down, so I would encourage the use of numbers to note when you plan to do a particular task. For example, if you are doing task 01, then write an 01 on the day grid.
Other missing elements: I decided to us the “7 Task” design as a starting point, so there are no time tracking bubbles. I think that’s OK for an on-the-go form, and it turns out that the 7 Task design is the more popular one.
Design Changes
I defined a grid size of 0.15 inches to use for spacing and sizing purposes. The width of the day grid hour box is 0.15″, and this is repeated across the entire design in multiples and dividers. This helps create a feeling of harmony in spacing across the design. This is not present in earlier versions of the form; I pretty much eyeballed those to look good.
Alignment helps too. I tried to align as many edges as possible while maintaining consistent spacing. All the horizontal lines line up to something else. Even the text elements align in some way to one of the horizontals.
One place that feels off, still is the positioning of the THREE MAJOR TASKS and WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON blocks. The way to fix that would be to raise the header a bit, so the space above the THREE MAJOR TASKS block matches the WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON block. As it is, visually the title block looks low compared to the horizontal rule to its left.
I altered the typography slightly. The numbers are now all 100% orange, instead of the 65% I had used in earlier printed designs. I wanted it to be a bolder form. There’s also more emphasis on the three most important tasks through use of background shading.
Scale
You can get a sense of the size difference between the various sizes of ETP from this photo:
The bottom-most pad is the regular US Letter pre-printed ETP. The middle pad is a custom job contracted by a company in Spain, in the A5 size. On top is the new 4×6″ design, sitting on a stack of large index cards.
For a better sense of how big this pad is, here’s a picture of it next to a fountain pen:
!@(images/11/1205-stickypad-etp-size-pen.jpg:F popimg: “A stack of US Letter, A5, and 4×6 designs”)
6 Comments
I love these. I own the large pad that’s on Amazon and I really prefer a bound A5 notepad for a work journal. A combined version would be phenomenal. If you see an order for a couple dozen when they go up for sale, that will probably be me.
Printed the picture at scale and used it as a test yesterday. Using a med rollerball and a med ball point there didn’t seem to be enough room to use the 1/2 hour divisions, just too tight. It was better using a pilot G2 and my finepoint space pen. I’d drop to either 18 or 16 hours to give a little bit more height on the half hour lines. I can’t see myself planning out that much of my day.
Over all the ETP idea is a great help to keep me on track, or to get back on track when I slip off. I like the idea of the top bound ones. That would solve my problem of keeping track of previous days without lugging a 3 ring binder everywhere with me.
Even in the current form I would say these sticky ones would be a buy for days where I am running between meeting all day.
Joe: Thanks for your feedback! It seems that the half-sized versions are what people want. Something more on-the-go!
Scott: You are awesome for actually testing it yourself! I made a version with 14 hours, which mirrors the full-size ETP. You can find it on the other post at the bottom.
I too am looking for a bound work journal type version. Will you make a full production run of the spiral bound version of the ETP?
Dave: New spacing on the 14 hr version works great!
I love these! I use them and so do many in my office. Brilliant stuff – I’d order these smaller ones in a second!