Viewing Category: ThinkingTools
Pursue Tangible Results to Achieve Greater Goals
The Concrete Goals Tracker (CGT) is the original Printable CEO™ form, created one evening in 2005 to alleviate my desire to have a "trusted personal CEO" that would tell me what to do. I figured since I couldn't hire anyone to do the job, I might be able to go the cheap route and print one up on paper :-)
Designed for Minimal Tracking Effort
The idea is pretty simple: every time you complete something on the "worth doing" task list, you award yourself points. ONLY things you've done that produce tangible benefits are worth points, and the point scale is weighted so the most goal-directed criteria earn the most. Goal-supporting achievements, which tend to happen more frequently, are weighted less. It's up to you whether a task "counts" or not toward your goal. You can even award multiple points for a single task if it makes sense to you...try your best to optimize!
The list shown here is designed to create a successful freelance practice, based on the idea that "showing and talking about your work leads to more work". It lists categories of tasks that can be framed as being productive relative to your overall goal. For a freelancer, that's making stuff and showing it to people, and also talking to people constantly so you are on their mind. It all pays off when you get that check. There's a small business version too in the downloads section.
As you accomplish various goal-related items throughout the day, fill in the appropriate bubble to log the points. At the end of the day, you will see how well you did (or didn't). Each CGT form tracks an entire week, so you will see how you did every day, and week-by-week...and most importantly, what you did to move yourself along your path. Since the items on the task list award points only for tangible results, you will have made actual progress.
The theory behind the form itself is described more in the original 2005 post on the Printable CEO and the followup Making of the Printable CEO; there is a good bit of video game design psychology embedded in this paper form.
Overall Application
The CGT has evolved into a bunch of other forms that help visualize different aspects of my workday, and I no longer use it daily because it actually did its job: it got me focused on some processes that actually deliver meaningful result; all I had to do was focus not on what they were, but how I could tell if I was on the right path or not, and whether my daily output was really helping me forward. The idea is pretty simple: by focusing on making things that people can see and counting what you've done in a simple daily manner, you plant the seeds for daily progress. This is a high level guidance tool, much like the way a good manager will tell you what she needs and you pick your own way of making that happen without a lot of micromanagement. With luck, this is a form you use to get started in a new direction, and then you will pretty much know what you need to be doing. I haven't heard much feedback about it lately, but the general impression I have is that people use it for 2 weeks to six months, then move on.
The concept is translatable to different fields too. For example, there was also some interest from a magazine, so I created a small business edition based on that.
Make New Year's Resolutions Printable Lists with the Editable Versions
New for 2008 are write in your own goals PDFs with suggested methodology for how I put together a good "worth doing" list, which is an art in itself. I've written instructions on how to create new year's resolutions using these forms. By using the make-your-own printable versions of the CGT, you can put together a pretty decent goal tracking kit using either 8.5x11 paper, index cards for you Hipster users, or mini-book formats (pocketmod compatible, even). There is also an editable Excel version.
Note: You'll need to use Acrobat Reader to modify the text fields in the editable PDF versions.
Download 2008 Concrete Goals Tracker Printable Forms
3x5" Index Card Printable Formats
PocketMod / MiniBook Format
Editable Excel Goals Tracker
- Download Editable Excel version. It isn't pretty, but it gets the job done. Use to create your own variations in points. Note that this is not an interactive calculator or tracker spreadsheet as is.
For an overview of all the forms available, visit The Printable CEO™ Series Page. Enjoy!
:: posted on Tuesday, January 01, 2008
This is the new Compact Calendar home page, which you can bookmark as http://davidseah.com/page/compact-calendar. I've made some small updates to the calendar to make it easier to update, and have added ISO 8601 week numbers to the "day starting on monday" version of the calendar.
» Impatient people: skip to 2008 COMPACT CALENDAR DOWNLOAD
About the Compact Calendar
I find myself doing more project planning these days, so I dusted off my old compact calendar from several years ago. It's just a simple printable calendar, packaged like a candy bar o' time, but the design justification runs more deeply than you might think.
The Candy Bar Theory of Calendar Design
I evolved this technique while still working at ActiveEdge, when I was doing a lot of on-the-fly estimating for proposals and production. The problem with traditional calendar design is that they chunk time in months, not continuous days. I generally am thinking of things like:
- How many days are available, including weekends?
- When are critical deliverables?
- How much calendar time is needed to finish a task?
- What are the specific days we have to work around?
One way to do this is to use a long timeline, like a Gantt chart. All the days line up one after the other in a long horizontal format, which makes it easy to see how long something takes; distance is directly equatable to duration. The drawback of the Gantt chart is its lack of compactness.
How To Use the Compact Calendar
Download the Microsoft Excel templates (they are .XLT files) and double-click them to open. If you're using a Mac, you may have to open them manually from Excel. Select the "Calendar" worksheet and print it out. If you don't need the entire date range, you may also select just a few rows; just make sure you choose "print selection" from Excel's print dialog box.
When I'm doing impromptu planning, I just circle dates and underline ranges, writing notes in the empty space on the right. It is basically a form of doodling your schedule. I find it's a great planning tool in meetings too; just whip out a few of these sheets out at a client meeting to do a quick thumbnail schedule on-the-spot.
The advantages of the Compact Calendar:
The days are all packed together visually, so "distance" corresponds directly to time. This makes visually estimating how much time you need much easier, an visual advantage shared with the Gantt chart.
The calendar for an entire year can fit on a single piece of paper, with plenty of room for notes. You can also just print out a section of it, for short projects.
It still largely retains the monthly calendar format, with days of the week in columns, so it's a bit easier to use than a Gantt chart.
Saturdays and Sundays are shaded differently, so we are not as tempted to plan our work schedule on them.
It's easy to count weeks too. "Unit weeks" tend to be the building blocks of longer-term projects.
You're forced to break up project tasks to fit into each 5-day work period. Gantt charts, by comparison, tend to draw long lines through the weekend because that's what lines want to do. Even if you don't work on the weekend, from a visual perspective it seems to imply that you should be working. This has always bugged me, from the perspective of visual gestalt and information design.
Because we retain the days of the week in the same column, it's easy to mark recurring events that are tied to them. "Oh, every Friday we have a company meeting." Easy to see where they'll be; not so on the Gantt chart.
The main drawback of the Compact Calendar is that you can't easily show dependencies or overlapping tasks. It's also not so good for detailed planning. For those cases, I would use my Excel spreadsheet version of the Gantt chart, which is much prettier than the ones that come out of Microsoft Project.
Another drawback of this approach is that it's hard to shift tasks around, but you know what? Project is terrible at that too; it's a glorified outliner with pretensions toward being a resource allocation tool, and it isn't very competent in either role. To be fair, I haven't looked at the more recent versions of Project. I have a license of it that I should install to see how it's evolved...but I digress.
Printing the Compact Calendar
It's an Excel spreadsheet template. Unzip CompactCalendar.zip and double-click the resulting CompactCalendar.xlt file to open a new copy of it.
Then print it out as-is. I keep a few printouts handy in case I need to do some on-the-fly planning. I will then go back and make an "official" version for distribution.
Anyway, there's three worksheets in the Excel file: Instructions, Calendar, and Tables. Usage notes are written in the Instructions sheet for your reference. Calendar is the actual sheet itself, and Tables contains the Holiday Lookup Table that highlights the right days in the Calendar sheet.
If you'd like to modify the calendar, here's some tips:
If you need to change the year, just modify the date of the first day in the calendar. This will recalculate all the days using Excel's own date calculations (therefore, it will handle leap years). In this version, you still have to manually shift around the month and holiday labels, but a future version may apply conditional formatting so that's no longer necessary.
You can add holidays to the HolidayTable on the Tables worksheet. This table is an Excel Named Range, so make sure that you don't screw it up.
There are two conditional formats in use: one that makes the background of the day blue for the first day of the month, and another that makes the day number itself bold and blue for holidays in the Holiday Table.
The Month Labels and Holiday Labels are not automatically positioned. You will need to do that yourself, but the HolidayTable should help you position them very easily.
If you don't need the entire year, you can select the range of rows you want, then when you print check "Selection" in the "Print What" part of the dialog box. The headers will print automatically at the top of the sheet, and it will also print a little larger. Useful for shorter projects.
Compact Calendar Workflow
Here's an example of the calendar in use...click the photo to zoom in!
In general, I use printouts as a thinking calendar, doodling in estimated times and circling dates, dependencies, and deliverables. You can see how I use lines to connect with the notes on the right side of the paper.
At client meetings I can use the calendar to note other dependencies, deliverables, and ask about company meetings and other potential conflicts like vacations. It's a lot easier to pass the sheet around than a laptop; people can contemplate paper more easily.
After I get things worked out, I will sometimes make a "clean" version of the schedule using a new sheet and give it to the client to photocopy.
When I'm managing other people in person, sometimes I'll use the Compact Calendar to quickly note their deliverables and the dates on this sheet. I'll also sometimes point out dependencies, and then they have this sheet they can just stick up on the wall and follow. I find that people just need to know when something is due so they can tackle the work; if they have to read a detailed spec or the proposal to find this critical information just slows things down. Specifics of course matter, but that's a post for another day.
Download the Calendar Template
INSTRUCTIONS
Download using the link below, unzip the archive. In the Excel folder, you'll see files named something like CompactCalendar.xlt. This is a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet template.
Double-click the file (Windows) and a new spreadsheet will be created based on the template.
Print it out, or annotate the calendar within Excel. Again, I just print them out; you could make a fancier "production calendar" too and print that instead, if you're that type of person.
Optionally you can copy the .xlt file into your Microsoft Excel templates folder. This gives you the ability to create new calendars using Excel's New Document command.
US Version
USA 2008 by Dave Seah
Includes Sun-Sat and Mon-Sun (w/ ISO8601 week numbers) versions in ZIP archive. You can also download the PDF Sun-Sat and PDF Mon-Sun versions too!
UPDATE: Michael has created an Apple iWork Numbers Template Version on his template solutions site. Go Numbers Go! :-)
International Calendar Versions
Many individuals have taken the time to provide the following localized country versions of the calendar...thank you everyone! If you would like to be added to the list, you must write a post on your own blog for me to link to. I had been providing impromptu tech support for people without blogs or their own file storage to help get the calendars online, but this has created a support headache for me and I am unable to process these files in a timely manner.
Argentina 2008 via Jeroen Sangers
Australia 2008 by Seth Yates
Australia 2008 (by State) by Leah Maclean
Belgium (NL) 2008 by Tijl Kindt
Brazil 2008 by Nicholas Almeida (w/ São Paulo holidays too)
Brazil 2008 by Carla do Brasil
Canada - Alberta 2008 by "Dave"
Canada - British Columbia 2008 by Canuck
Chile 2008 via Jeroen Sangers
China (PRC) 2008 byiWorm
Colombia 2008 via Jeroen Sangers
Colombia 2008 by Javier Ferrand
Czech Republic 2008 by arnarey
Denmark 2008 by Henrik Fylking-Nielsen
Ecuador 2008 by timoleon
Ecuador 2008 via Jeroen Sangers
Fiji 2008 by Neil Krish Goundar
France 2008 by Le TisseurDeToile
Ghana 2008 via Sebastian Spier
Guatemala 2008 via Jeroen Sangers
Germany 2008 by problemloeser
Hungary 2008 by Zoltan Till
India 2008 by Shikhar
India 2008 by Venkat Mangudi
Indonesia 2008 by Eka
Italy 2008 by Luca Magnani
Italy 2008 w/ ISO 8601 Weeks by Paolo Ciarrocchi
Italy 2008 w/ week column by Alexander Reif
Japan 2008 by Yoshiomi KURISU
Korea 2008 by Hyun-soo Lee
Korea 2008 by Malbong
Malaysia 2008 by Fredy
Mexico 2008 via Jeroen Sangers
The Netherlands 2008 by Piter plus Frisian version
New Zealand 2008 by Big Nosed Ugly Guy
Norway 2008 by Jorunn
Norway 2008 by Vidar G.
Norway 2008 by Ole
Poland 2008 by Poweruser
Portugal 2008 by Miguel Alho
Romania 2008 by Andrei Neculau
Singapore 2008 by Chew LH
Slovenia 2008 by Kajote
South Africa 2008 by Jason Bagley
Spain 2008 by Jeroen Sangers
Sweden 2008 by Jim Carlberg
Switzerland 2008 by Claude Knaus
Taiwan 2008 by E. Sheng
Thailand 2008 by David Mould
Turkey 2008 by Dokur
United Kingdom 2008 Bank Holidays (English) by headphonaught
If you don't see your country listed here, you might check the old 2007 listing, or check back later. If you have made a version, let me know! :-)
OTHER TOOLS
You can find more printable productivity tools on The Printable CEO™ Series page.
:: posted on Monday, November 26, 2007
James Bicker just shot me an email telling me about his Majency Oracle Cards:
The Majency Oracle is a 169-card deck of original prompts or "matches" to spark the imagination of writers, poets, or any creative individual that needs inspiration.
As James mentions, it's similar in spirit to Brian Eno's famed Oblique Strategies. This one, though, is a free download...why are you still here? :-)
:: posted on Monday, August 20, 2007
A long time ago, I offhandedly wrote that I used to make Gantt Charts in Excel to help visualize project flow. I've never uploaded these files because I didn't think they were that exciting. I'm basically just using Excel like graph paper, and there is absolutely no automatic calculation at all. On the other hand, it's probably a lot EASIER to keep up to date, through copying/pasting and inline annotation, than actual software like Microsoft Project.
Enough people have asked, however, that I'm finally releasing a couple of examples of how I put these Excel-based Gantt charts together.
When you download the ZIP archive, you'll see two files:
- The
.xlsx file, for Microsoft Office 2007, with fancy shading.
- The regular old
.xls file, for older versions of Excel.
The color schemes are slightly different in each file, but you should get the idea. Again, you will not find anything earth-shattering in here, but you might have fun playing around with the formatting.
Enjoy!
UPDATE: I originally mentioned that I made these Excel Gantt charts way back in the first Compact Calendar post, which is another ad-hoc planning approach I use to estimate projects.
UPDATE 2: Kent Larsson has converted the template to Google Spreadsheets! Thanks Kent!
:: posted on Monday, August 13, 2007
As technology gets newer and I get older, learning new things becomes frustrating. For example, I want to learn how to work with MySQL for web development, program 3D games, and play the guitar, but my lack of ability in these areas prevents me from achieving my overall life goals. There's also day-to-day stuff that, as a 40-year old American male, I feel I should know: balance my household finances, invest in the markets, ride horses, and flirt with women without throwing up. These are tasks that are, from my perspective, hard to learn for several reasons: a lack of good mentors, reference materials, and classes. And that's even without mentioning the magnetic properties of my ass with respect to my couch.
When I overcome these obstacles, I still hit the proverbial brick wall; for whatever reason, my brain can't quite deal with the important task of learning before getting bored or sleepy, and I end up going to get a sandwich instead or watching Age of Love on TV.
It's easy to presume, as I join the ranks of the Newly Old, that my mind is becoming less flexible. This is the common wisdom; for example, people say that it's tough to learn languages when you're older, and that we should have done it when our minds were most facile: around the age of 6, I think. Although I don't have any studies to back me up, I'm pretty sure that other factors are greater contributors:
We're self-conscious about not being competent in front of other adults, so we iterate less and thus learn more slowly.
We're not particularly motivated, given that mass media tells us it's supposed to be easy. When it's not, we give up.
Since we're all grown up and have our own money, we expect to be able to buy knowledge and expertise readily. It's really amazing just what you can buy, and we've grown to expect the easy access or we get real mad. It doesn't help that our advertising, at least here in the USA, tends to emphasize the quick and easy fix. We expect instant gratification, and thus we've forgotten how hard it was to learn our first lessons, and we've also perhaps forgotten how to learn for ourselves. I wonder if kids these days even know what it's like to have to wait for anything.
A LESSON FROM THE PAST
Yesterday morning I was doing my morning coffee thing, glumly looking at all the things I wanted to do that I was unable to follow through with due to a lack of understanding. One of the main ones has been transitioning my blog to Expression Engine, which I think will allow me to more easily expand the content offerings on my website while improving overall service. I had met up with Mark J. Reeves recently for lunch recently to catch up, and asked him about the possibility of writing a web service that would save data from my Flash Apps and integrate with the Expression Engine user management system. Mark, who's a competent execution-oriented web developer, told me exactly what I needed to do: write some SQL queries to access the pertinent database tables, maybe even repurpose the underlying blog engine to store data for me in custom fields. The problem: I don't know SQL, or what tools to use, or even how to talk to the database. I am paralyzed by not knowing what the best practices are, haunted by issues of scalability and security, and most importantly of all: I was not looking forward to learning all that stuff. I could not readily apprehend the structure of the material, and therefore I could not approach it logically.
Reflecting on this experience, I found myself reminiscing about my youth, when I first started learning about computers. Today, computers don't scare me at all, and it's because I have experienced them nearly to the transistor level of operation. As a result, I can look at a computer system and "read its aura" to figure out what's really going on. That is now, but when I was in the 7th grade, computers were as mysterious to me as, um, MySQL is to me right now. I vowed that I would master the computer and learn all its secrets. Somehow.
And so I started my notebook:
Some historical notes first: this actually isn't the original notebook: it's a manually-transcribed copy. The original copy went to a kid named Derek Bumpas, which I handed to him just before I graduated; he had a good attitude and was eager to learn even though he was in the 8th or 9th grade. He recently contacted me, some 20 years later, to say that getting that notebook had meant a great deal to him, and had helped put him on his path in computer science. That was really nice to hear.
When I first started taking these notes---recall that there was no Internet, hard disks, or multi-window multi-tasking operating systems---paper was the only way to simultaneously take notes and learn. Every nugget of wisdom gleaned from hours of tinkering was transcribed, as cleanly as I could, into this notebook so I could share information with friends at school. There were all kinds of things in the book, all of them interesting to me. It was, in essence, my spellbook. Here's some of the entries:
INCANTATION
An Applesoft BASIC routine to reformat a long string so it would display nicely on a 40-character wide text display; in today's desktop publishing terms, it does "ragged-right justification" for a monospaced font. This was a common task that I had to solve in my various text-based programs, as I was pretty obsessed back then with things looking right. I finally wrote it down...my first incantation.
TRANSMUTATION
As a high school kid without any money, we often "had" to copy software. The difference was that software back then came on 5.25" floppy disks that were copy-protected using peculiar algorithms; it was a fun challenge to try to figure out exactly how to elegantly disable them by rewriting the program code. This was my real education in computer software debugging. The code listing shown here is written in 6502 assembly language, revealing the method behind the protection. By understanding the principle behind the interaction with the disk hardware's imperfections and the software code that exploited them, a copy-protected disk could be transmuted into one that was easily-copied with everyday copy utilities.
SORCERY
As I started to understand assembly language, I learned how mapping the interface between code and hardware (the "input/output", or I/O routines) allowed one to zero-in on the game logic itself. For example, say I wanted to be able to change a shooting game so I had "unlimited bullets". By looking for the specific code that read the joystick button state (e.g.: is it pressed?) I could easily find the code that was responsible for checking how much ammunition was left. And once you decode one piece of code, you can infer the purpose of surrounding code. I was able to modify the game Beyond Castle Wolfenstein (the original Apple II one from 1984) to give me a 30-round submachine gun with burst capability, and rewrote the opening story to explain why you had one in the first place. This changed the nature of the game quite dramatically. By documenting the logic behind the software and noting the location of critical routines, the granting of unnatural abilities within the game world became possible.
ENCHANTING
I attended an American high school in Taiwan, and software was difficult to find for teaching purposes. Taiwan being a rather gray area in terms of copyright, my science professors would sometimes enlist my help to help them make backups of the US-sourced software; the humidity and mold in Taiwan tended to eat disks very quickly in the sub-tropical environment. Most of the time, educational software was protected with fairly straight-forward techniques using off-the-shelf protection systems. Because they were rather generic, the same general process could be used to remove the locks with just a few steps. In this photo, I wrote down the process of disenchanting this particularly piece of software, which required the use of a specialized instrument called "Advanced DeMuffin".
THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE
And then there were the great unsolved challenges against which I beat my head. Electronic Arts had a very advanced protection routine that was designed specifically to defeat the casual copy breaker; you needed special hardware installed in your computer to even get at the code, and then you needed to understand it. I spend many hours trying to understand just how Electronic Arts' incredibly fast boot system worked, and once I understood that I tried to trace how they were doing the copy protection. Smarter crackers in the U.S. had already done it, but it was beyond my abilities and knowledge to follow. Here's a fragment of my research on the area...to me, to be able to understand this code would be like transmuting lead into gold. I should search online to see if any back issues of Computist describe this. I still kind of want to know how it worked.
THE MODERN SPELL BOOK
It's been years since I've kept any kind of notebook like this, with the exception of my patentable ideas journal. There's so much material out there now that the task of learning is equated with finding resources: the right teacher, book, or online tutorial is perceived as the "magic bullet" that will get things done. However, what I have forgotten is that the process of distilling these ideas into a form that I can invoke at will is necessary as well. It's my missing link.
I went out and bought some of the larger Quadrille-ruled Moleskine Cahiers ($14.95 for 3), and pasted a paper label on the front of it (the picture is at the top of this post). The idea is to start recording the same kind of notes that I used to do in the 7th through 12th grade; looking back, it was a highly productive period of time for me, though I didn't recognize it then. I'm thinking of just writing down really basic things that are currently mystifying, by hand, for reference in this book. I know there are plenty of reference books and online sources that purport to do this already, but do you think any aspiring wizard would buy their spellbook off-the-shelf? NO WAY! They would be told by their cantankerous mentors to go find a sturdy book and pen, and transcribe their spells themselves by hand. Because that's the way you learn, and that's the way you bind the magic to yourself.
WHAT WAS OLD IS NEW AGAIN
Ok, you may have figured out that this whole "spellbook" thing is just an amusing way for me to start learning again. The main takeaway is this: by assembling my own book of "recipes" that actually make something, I'm much more likely to maintain some kind of focus on learning. In the past, what I've done is just read everything and picked out the main principles as they've revealed themselves. What I have forgotten is that transcribing the nuggets is just as useful. I think I probably forgot this because it's so easy to just let the actual implementation replace documentation: Photoshop files, HTML, javascript libraries, etc. I don't think this is a good foundation, because you can cut 'n paste your way very quickly into the structural equivalent to spaghetti code.
Packaging the information into nuggets as I learn, which I used to do when I was younger, may be the way for me to approach the new technologies that are making my head hurt now. As an adult I had expected things to get easier, but really they are just as hard. Fortunately, I now remember how I worked through the challenge.
We'll see how it goes. In the meantime, I'm just pleased with the way my new SQL notebook looks :-)
:: posted on Thursday, June 21, 2007
