Viewing Category: Tools
NOTE: This article covers the OLD version of Google Analytics at the time of this writing. The current version of Analytics, launched in 2007, is much different.
At the end of October, I moved to a new server and decided to stop using the web traffic logging provided by Mint. There were three reasons behind this decision:
I was spending way too much time checking my stats.
Someone mentioned to me that the size of my WordPress database was surprisingly large. Let me guess...you're running stats? went the comment.
I was reading in the old host's acceptable use policy for databases that stat logging was specifically disallowed. Ooops.
So I dropped Mint and tried surviving on Google Analytics and the free version of Statcounter. That experiment has ended today, and I've decided to reinstall Mint.
Why I Track Stats
Since the vast majority of blog visitors do not leave comments, watching web statistics is one of the primary feedback mechanisms that help me assess what's going on with my writing. The raw numbers of interest to a blogger are page views and unique visitors; it's very satisfying to see the numbers slowly rise over time. When there's a big spike in traffic, that often means that there is something interesting going on elsewhere on the Internet with my name attached to it somehow, and that's good to know.
Also of interest are search terms used to find the site, popular content, and who has linked to me. To a lesser extent, I'm also interested in what outbound links people are clicking on. This gives me a view of how people are using the site, what's popular, what's not, and what's surprising. I once saw a whole bunch of hits from a webmail system from a university, and I later learned that The Printable CEO™ stuff had been making the rounds there. Fascinating!
All three stat trackers I've mentioned rely on Javascript to tickle a webservice on a server to log a visit. The advantage of these services over regular web server log analyzers (Analog, Webalyzer, HTTPAnalyze) is realtime statistics; I can see what's going on at any time of the day to watch trends unfold. With a server log package, the stats are usually available at the end of the day, when it's too late to do anything about a rise in traffic.
Anyway, the javascript-based stat trackers require that there's a webservice for the database to communicate with. For Google Analytics and Statcounter, the servers are under their control. With Mint, you use your website as the server (requirements: a PHP-enabled web server and a MySQL database). Here's how they compare:
Comparing Cost
Mint costs $30/site, and logs everything to your own MySQL database.
Google Analytics is free and doesn't have any limits I know of. UPDATE: It might actually not store data past a month, not sure.
Statcounter is free for up to 100 logged visits at a time. For site that gets more than 50-100 hits a day, you'll need to pay a monthly fee (minimum: $9 for 1000 hits logged, $29 gets you 25K).
I keep the free version of StatCounter enabled because I've always used it, so I can see the the history of web traffic from the day I started blogging.
Comparing Realtime Utility
Mint reports activity to the minute, and is extendable through plugins (called "Peppers") that add additional tracking capabilities. You can get a list of Mint plugins to see what extensions have already been authored.
Statcounter is also up-to-date on a minute-by-minute basis. However, the aforementioned log limit for the free version makes trendwatching over several days difficult without paying at least $29/month. Since Mint itself costs $30 for one-time use, it's a better deal.
Google Analytics is not up-to-the-minute. It seems to take between 4 hours-24 hours to update with the latest data. This is far better than the week it took when the service was hammered by new registrants, but still Mint and Statcounter handily trounce it. Google Analytics is getting faster, but the delay is such that I don't feel it's particularly real-time.
Comparing Quality of Experience
Mint's front end is attractive, robust, and highly useful. The base installation is good for tracking data over a period of time, searches, and referrers. With extensions, you can track downloads, outclicks, and trends, all within the same slickly-designed GUI. Thumbs up! Very Web 2.0! The one thing that is missing is visitor tracking; I know there is a SessionTracker plugin, but it's not as useful as Statcounter's implementation.
Statcounter looks more like an old-school web app, but it provides lots of useful ways of digging through the actual behaviors of your site visitors. In this regard I like it better than Mint, particularly for its visitor tracking capabilities. You can start with a hit from a search result, and then track the trail of page visits to see how people are exploring your site. The SessionTracker pepper for Mint does allow you to see visitor paths, but it doesn't let you track from the very first hit. It is essentially a stand-alone plugin co-existing in the same UI shell, so it can't integrate the data from other parts of Mint (i.e. the keyword search data is is not cross-referenced into the session trail). Statcounter also seems to do a better job of reverse DNS lookup to convert numeric IP numbers to their domain names without making you wait; they probably cache the DNS information. While Mint CAN do the reverse lookup with the XXX Strong Mint plugin, it takes a lot of time and you will have to wait many seconds for each lookup to complete, not to mention that this may bog down your server if you have a large log; this is not the sort of thing you would want to do on a shared server.
Google Analytics feels to me like a hybrid Web 2.0 application, and at first glance provides TONS of useful information and pretty graphs. It has a neat graphical overlay of popular clicks and their position on the page, neat mapping capabilities, flexible date range-based statistical sorting, and a full complement of export capabilities. It also integrates with your AdWords campaigns and gives you all the information you need to track the performance of your content. However, for my needs I don't find it particularly fun to use because the information I need is buried under layers of menus. I can't track session trails through the site in the way I'd like to. It takes several clicks through several menus to get the referrer, keyword search, and popularity results, and I can never remember which is which. Factor in its lag time in updating, and the experience is less than satisfying. With Mint, I can get the big picture of what's going on with my web traffic all on one page. With Google Analytics, I've got to dig through a lot of reports. Plus, Mint just looks better.
In short, Mint does a great job of giving me the information I need to see trends. Statcounter does a better job of showing how people (anonymously, I should mention) are spending their time exploring the site over a period of time. Google Analytics does a lot of that too, but requires too much clicking and page refreshing to build the same picture, with less detail than either Statcounter or Mint. Perhaps all this clicking and raw data is the nature of "web analytics", and I just don't get it.
So Mint is Back Online. Long live Mint!
I'm sure there are tons of other tracking services that I could look into, but these are the three I have the most experience with. For inexpensive, realtime tracking of web traffic, I've found that I needed Mint back. While I had it uninstalled, I found myself going back to Statcounter every 30 minutes to get that "big picture", because Google Analytics just wasn't updating fast enough AND it's cumbersome to get at the stats that I care most about:
- Current traffic levels by the hour and day
- What's popular
- Where links are coming from
- What's being downloaded
- What outgoing links are being clicked
With Google Analytics, getting that information (if it's even available) takes 8-10 clicks in nested menus. With Mint, it's just a matter of visiting the page and looking at it. If I was running actual web marketing campaigns on my site, I'm sure Google Analytics would be far more useful, but as that's not the case it's not for me. If I had the money I would use Statcounter because I like its drill-down features.
Screenshots: Mint
Here's what the Preferences screen looks like. It's all yummy DHTML / AJAX / Web 2.0. Very pretty and functional (in FireFox, anyway).
And here's my main Mint screen. Additional peppers installed (aka plugins): Outclicks, DLoads, Trends, Notification (this sends me an email if some interesting event occurs, like more pageloads in an hour than is normal), SessionTracker, and Sparks.
I should note that I have been tracking data for less than a day, so there aren't a whole lot of stats to look at. But you get the idea.
Another note: I recently dropped DLoads because this was apparently the cause of the massive server spikes that got me kicked off my old server...I think DLoad's method of reading files into PHP to buffer files caused much memory overusage. I switched to Steve Smith's Download Counter as an alternative.
Dave's Assessment: This is a good middle ground between the nutty data overload that is Google Analytics, and the more intimate tracking provided by StatCounter.
» Link to Mint home page. And a bonus link to digital renaissance man Shaun Inman, the creator of Mint.
Screenshots: Google Analytics
Google Analytics is capable of displaying a lot of interesting data and reporting, but it's just overkill for me. There is so much reporting that I've just hilighted a few of the features here:
Here's the main "executive summary" screen for Google Analytics, when you first log-in. Note that there isn't any data for today yet in the system (it's already 830AM here).
The top content on my site, apparently. I had to hunt-and-click through the menus on the left to get here.
The always-interesting "So how did people get to my site?" referring sources page.
I've never seen this page before, but it looks interesting.
Dave's assessment: Should I ever run a web marketing campaign and needed to learn how to use all this data, I would look at this again.
» Link to the Google Analytics home page.
Screenshots: StatCounter
The very Web 1.0 main page of StatCounter. Very straightforward. Since I've been using StatCounter from the time I started blogging, I can see the traffic plotted all the way back by adjusting the date range. It's a pain in the ass to do that in Google Analytics (and it doesn't seem to save data for more than a few months anyway).
I drilled down into the hits for the root page of "davidseah.com". Since I only have 100 hits logged, and am getting about 200-300 hits per hour, I don't see much detailed information. Here you can see, though, that there's one user who has returned 33 times. And he/she uses a Mac! :-)
This is a different user than the one above, but you can get an idea of what StatCounter allows you to do by drilling further down into the stats. You can actually see what a specific user is doing, and where they're coming from.
You may not know their name, but StatCounter is able to trace the browsing habits of a specific user over time, IF you have enough historical data stored in the databases. That comes back down to how many log entries you're paying for. If I 25,000 log entries ($29/month), I'd be able to see quite a bit more history and build a better picture of what people are really doing.
BTW, the blurred-out data in the screenshots is just the IP address and reverse-lookup. It's some cable modem network in the Netherlands. StatCounter doesn't give you the magical ability to look up personal names.
Dave's assessment: StatCounter allows you to track the browsing patterns of individual users easily, which is something that Mint and Google Analytics can't touch. If I was trying to understand the psychology of my visitors to build some kind of mental image of my core audience, I might use something like this. If this kind of tracking bothers you, you might consider blocking cookies from these sites.
» Link to the StatCounter home page.
3 WEEKS LATER...
It's January 4th, and today I was LifeHackered, which took down my site. The helpful folks at my hosting company (FutureQuest) narrowed down the issue to Mint, which was causing server load spikes in excess of 100+. After they disabled it, loads dropped down back to normal.
I thought about this for a bit, and thought that since Mint peppers don't share data, they might be invoking a LOT of extra database and CPU activity for every page load. And they might be doing it inefficiently. I uploaded another instance of Mint (the old one was locked out) and used that to change the configuration to unload everything except the default pepper. Then I asked FutureQuest to re-enable it, which they did cautiously. Since then the load apparently has been OK (Mint hasn't been taken offline again)...2693 page loads in the last hour, and the load has averaged between 1.5 and 3.5. Not great, but not terrible.
Still, this brings up some high traffic considerations when using Mint on a shared server:
Beware of Peppers. They may cause excess CPU utilization, and get you kicked off your shared server when you experience even moderately-high traffic. And yes, I am already cacheing. I see that there's a benchmark flag built into Mint since 1.24, which might be helpful in tracking down which Peppers are the culprit. However, I'm not sure if it benchmarks the actual ping on each pageload. The default installation by itself seems to work fine.
The Fresh Look is Fleeting. Mint is designed to give you an at-a-glance sense of what's going on with your website. When you get a lot of traffic, that freshness is harder to catch. I spend a lot of time looking at unique referrers, and when they're ALL unique and happening several times a minute, you quickly lose 'em. This is probably when using a regular log analysis tool would make more sense, especially if it can tell you WHEN certain pages became popular.
I've been using the various Task Order Up! variations for the past week, and in general I like the idea and the card format. I'm particularly liking the 4x6 card version 5: they're small enough to keep handy and fit in my back pocket, yet big enough to be noticed on my desk; the 3x5 cards tend to get a little lost.
What's interesting: a different kind of job tracking methodology is starting to fall out of this, which is great because I've hit a wall with intermittent projects. I have about 5 or 6 client projects of constantly shifting priorities. Sometimes these projects go dormant for a week or two; one has actually entered deep hibernation due to an internal reorganization.
As I'm not particularly adept at juggling, I've adapted the Task Order Up into something that retains the check-rail compatible qualities, but is more suitable for tasks that are spread over a longer period of time.
Enter the Intermittent Task Tracker.
The Basic Idea
The basic idea behind all the card-based things I've been doing (other than I love cards) is the maintaining of continuity. Compared to tools like the Task Progress Tracker, the Intermittent Task Tracker focuses on maintaining a collection of cards instead of an overall project list. If you like coming at your projects from a top down perspective, you'll probably like the Task Progress Tracker format. If you like thinking more on the details of a task level, then the Intermittent Task Tracker (and the various forms of Task Order Up!) may appeal to you more.
Another way of looking at it: The Task Progress Tracker is great if you like one piece of paper, and maintain a folder of your projects as your continuity-maintaining device. The Intermittent Task Tracker is great if you like multiple cards, and have a recipe box, thumbtack, or check rail system. That's my theory, anyway.
Compared to the Task Order Up: The ITT is designed for use over a period spanning more than a week, when you have projects that don't have hard deadlines. Another project category would be hourly-rate type jobs like maintenance contracts, retained hours, and other "open billed" projects.
Of course, you can use the Intermittent Task Tracker as a regular Task Order Up card...nothing's stopping ya!
Changes from the Task Order Up!
I've dropped the "total hours used" area though because it's not as necessary; while this is useful if you're in a timecard environment and need to sum up your project hours on a weekly basis, that's not the use I need for these.
On the right you can see a scan of an example card; this is pretty much how I'm expecting to use it this week:
There are triangles on the left side of the 15-min bubbles. These mark a new dated entry, so you can separate what hours go with what day with a bit of counting.
Each card can handle up to 20 hours. If you run out of bubbles, just grab a new card and assign a new CARD# at the bottom. This allows you to keep the cards in sequence, and maintain the history of the project in an index card box.
You'll note the use of | marks between bubbles. They're unfortunately a little too close together to easily use (a different color pen would be useful here). These correspond to the / marks in the descriptions; for example, the 5/9 entry shows a "kickoff meeting" and a "first draft". The | mark in the bubbles for the first entry show the split of time: 1hr 15min for the kickoff, and another 30 min for the design draft.
Each description has a dated entry. This is new; the Task Order Up, by comparison, doesn't need these because the tasks are supposed to be short and doable within the span of a week. For intermittent tasks spread over weeks, the date is necessary.
The very last entry shows an example of estimated time. I traced empty circles indicating how much time I thought this task might take to complete, and filled them in as I went. As it so happened, it took less time, and noted this.
Since the job is complete, I wrote closed job at the bottom of the card, just so it's clear it's terminated. This is also indicated by the "1 / 1" at the bottom of the card; you would add the "/ 1" when you know the job is complete. If you run out of space on the card, file it away and make new cards with an incremented card number.
The jobcode is a system I use internally; I assign every incoming prospect a jobcode number, and create a corresponding folder on my production computer's _local_projects folder. This folder is periodically backed up to my main fileserver, or whenever I feel nervous. That number is also used for invoicing, naming BaseCamp projects, and for my SVN repository. One of these days I'll have to automate the whole thing, but I've been too lazy to do it.
As others have noted, you can always write notes on the back of the card!
So that's it! I'll be using this format this week as I close out some lingering projects.
Download the Intermittent Task Tracker
» Download the Intermittent Task Tracker 4x6
» PrintableCEO-ITT01-4X6.pdf
Enjoy!
I feel I must apologize for the sheer number of Task Order Up variations that are cropping up. I have no idea which ones are the most popular...if you have a favorite format or size, let me know so I can keep it alive.
» This article is part of The Printable CEO Series
By request, I've whipped out a quick version of the Compact Calendar that starts on Monday instead of Sunday. Let me know if there are any errors.
» Download Compact Calendar for 2006 (first day is Monday)
» Filename: CompactCalendarMon.zip
I recently found myself doing more project planning than I have in a while, so I dusted off my old compact calendar. I first made this years ago, when I needed to estimate realistic project schedules for various proposals. 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.
This page has moved to http://davidseah.com/page/compact-calendar
The guys at Blue Flavor have created awesome paper-based time-tracking worksheets.
If you've ever worked at a place that requires timesheets, you may have been struck by the extra bit of tedium they add to your work week. Normal time sheets are tedious because they require re-transcription of hour data, and don't lend themselves to hour-by-hour use. They also do a terrible job of giving you an "at a glance" feel for how productive (e.g. billable or company-building) a particular week was. At most places I've worked, I have maintained my hours separately using an Excel spreadsheet so I could pull meaningful project-related data from my historical data in addition to meeting the timesheet requirement.
The Blue Favor design is inspired in part by the concepts behind The Printable CEO™, and neatly addresses the issues I've had with timesheets in the past. The timesheets (there are two variations) are excellent examples of workflow-oriented practical design thinking, targeting the needs of weekly hour accounting in a format that supports "on-the-job" use. When I first made the PCEO form, I was concerned about how "Management" could wrongfully apply the concepts. Perhaps I needn't have worried; this is a kick-ass application of the PCEO.
I wish I'd thought of it :-)
My Dad has been having some trouble with his Windows PC...apparently some programs "disappeared" from his desktop under mysterious circumstances. He requested Remote Assistance, the Microsoft Windows XP feature that allows you to control a computer over the Internet. However, first we had to get Remote Assistance working. Compounding the problem: Dad lives 13 time zones away, and communication over the telephone is impossible because of his hearing disability.
I thought this would be a good opportunity to give Fog Creek Software's CoPilot a try. Like Remote Assistance, CoPilot makes it possible to control a computer over the Internet, except it uses a regular web browser to kick off the entire process and (this is important) works through firewalls automatically. Remote Assistance possibly needed some configuration on Dad's router, but since he hadn't set it up himself I was anticipating some issues.
I'd heard about CoPilot on Joel on Software; it's a product put together by the best interns Joel could find. Helping Dad with his computer was a great excuse to try out the latest from Fog Creek Software.
The CoPilot Experience
Setting up from the browser was very easy. The logistics of communicating what to do, however, still proved difficult.
Synchronizing: Some concepts, like using signals to coordinate and acknowledge action, are actually pretty geeky. Just coordinating a time when both of us would be sitting in front of the computer was surprisingly difficult, mostly because I was confused about what time it actually was in Taiwan. So I'd send Dad an email saying, "around this time let's try it, so send me an email when you're ready so I can start the connection" and then we'd miss each other. I ended up being off by an hour, or Dad would be waiting at the computer and not send me the email, or he'd send the email and I'd miss it in the flurry of other emails I get. We finally got it down after a couple of days. This could have been fixed with a quick phone call, and in retrospect we should have used that to signal. However, it's expensive to call, and it never occurs to me anymore because we can't communicate effectively via telephone in the first place. Used just as a signalling device, though, it would have saved some time :-)
Explaining: The CoPilot sign-up process requires that the person requesting assistance to enter a special code, then download a small program. This program is keyed with the special code, and allows only the helper with the same code to connect.
There were two problems. The first one was just a matter of Dad knowing that he had to download a program and then run it. Not as simple as it sounds. First of all, where does the downloaded program go? I told him it was on the Desktop, which is....what? And of course downloading a program off the Internet triggers all kinds of warnings with the anti-virus software, which doesn't make it seem like anything GOOD is happening. Eventually any sane person just loses patience and clicks OK to everything...it's no wonder that this is such a problem. Sheesh. Making matters worse was that long label of the file itself...it's FogCreekCoPilot.Exe or something like that, and it ends up being shown as FogCree... on his desktop. First we were at CoPilot.com, but now he can't find a file named CoPilot. Gah.
The second problem was that the downloaded CoPilot program does not identify which code it is using when you run it. The first code we used was for the two-minute trial, to ensure that CoPilot actually would work. It did, so I bought a 24 hoursday pass and sent Dad the new code link via email. Dad ended up using the wrong one the second time we did a connection, because he didn't know he had to use a new download. His desktop became quite cluttered with old versions of the program. We eventually get this sorted out, and he runs the right one (FogCreekCoPilot (5).exe).
After we got the program up and running, everything was OK. CoPilot is based on VNC (the source code is available, as it's open source). I could see JPEG artifacting as screen chunks were transferred over the net, but it worked. We encountered a few problems:
If both Dad and I tried to use the mouse / keyboard at the same time, we would disconnect. At least, that's what seemed to trigger the disconnect.
If I moved too many things on the screen, or caused too massive a screen update, we would get disconnected.
CoPilot is designed to automatically reconnect when the connection drops. In practice this didn't work for us. My side of the connection would display the "reconnecting" prompt, and nothing would happen except for the program entering a "not responding" state. If I force-quit the program and restarted, it would usually reconnect, and I would see a dialog box on my Dad's computer saying "The Fog Creek Copilot service can not connect because another user with your invitation code is already connected from a different computer. If you are sure that no one selse is connected, please wait a few minutes and try again." Some kind of race condition exacerbated by the long distance connection across half the world? Dad's laptop was purchased here in the US, and still has the US Version of Windows XP on it, so I'm stumped. The Testimonials page lists someone in India who had no problems, so there must be something fishy going on in Taichung...
Overall it was a usable experience, brought to the edge of frustration by the three problems I list above. Screen updates were pretty slow; Dad is on a high speed DSL line in Taiwan, I'm on Cable. His uplink speed is probably around 128-300kbps (12-30K/sec), which is going to be slow when screen-sized JPEG-encoded bitmaps are being sent back . The interactive performance between Dad's computer in Taiwan and mine here in the US averaged about 0.5 frame per second, with screen refreshes taking 10-20 seconds when a lot happened. This may not be typical for US-based broadband, but I didn't have an opportunity to try it out.
The Remote Assistance Experience
After using CoPilot to fix the immediate problems with Dad's computer, the next thing I did was install MSN Messenger, which I thought was one of the requirements of Remote Assistance. I set it up so would only see my MSN screenname, with his profile invisible.
We then worked out how to connect via the Remote Assistant Wizard built-into XP. This was fairly straightforward, with some gotchyas:
I'm using Trillian 3.1 for my MSN connection instead of the real MSN Messenger client. Trillian does not accept Remote Connection requests. Therefore, Dad had to use the "send email" function instead. This sends an attachment with a Remote Assistance "shortcut", which I can double-click to launch. Next time I'm on his computer, I'm going to nuke MSN off the machine and install Trillian instead.
When creating an "invitation" for Remote Assistance, the requester has the option of entering a password. The idea of the double password fields ("enter your password", "confirm your password") was confusing to Dad, and he entered only one password before clicking "confirm". The wizard complained, and did NOTHING to highlight the missing field. Crappy QA. The dialog could have been better design...small text just looks like background texture to Dad, and he's not in the habit of reading every bit of text on the screen. Who wants to? There's so much of it and it does a terrible job of explaining what to do. Instead it just describes what to do, which isn't the same thing. Useless!
Different generations assume different default capitalization rules for passwords. He automatically capitalized the words, because to him that seems more natural. I automatically typed mine in all lower case.
We kept CoPilot running at the same time so I could watch him. That was cool! It allowed me to watch Dad establish the remote connection from scratch. When he needed help, I'd send him an instant message through MSN.
On a side note, Remote Assistance is considerably faster than CoPilot in interactive performance. CoPilot was painfully slow at times; the update rate was on the order of half a frame per second at best. Remote Assistance could manage maybe 2 frames a second. A lot of it depends on how much screen is being redrawn, because all those bits need to be shipped back to the assisting computer; with CoPilot, a full screen refresh would take up to a minute if we didn't lose the connection. Remote Assistance seems to be a little smarter about refreshes (it's based on the mature Windows Terminal Services technology), which is where it picks up the speed advantage.
I was surprised that the Remote Assistance setup didn't have problems traversing our firewalls. While reading about firewall support for RA, I found out what the the UPnP router setting helps with automatic forwarding of ports injust this situation. I had never turned it on before. The receiving computer (the person being helped) needs port 3389 forwarded. That's a pickle! There should be a version of RA that's called Demand Help, which puts the onus on the EXPERT to handle the port forwarding :-) My Dad's router must have this UPnP feature enabled.
Is There Money in This?
Despite the issues we had with CoPilot, I like what it's capable of doing. They have flexible subscription models that allow a person to help any number of people. It's similar to a cell phone plan: buy the number of minutes you need at a certain level, then pay a per-minute rate if you use more than that. There's also pay-as-you-go, and you can choose to bill the person receiving help using either PayPal or a credit card. There's also the 24-hour day pass, which allows you unlimited use for a 24 hour period starting from time of first successful connection.
While I would hesitate to ask a novice computer user to pay a bill over the Internet, I could see using CoPilot to do virtual computer consulting and one-on-one training. You can see almost everything that the other person is doing; combined with telephone support, you could really do an effective training session without having to leave the house. Even the slow update rate is an advantage, as experts tend to type and move the mouse too fast for novices users to follow.
Unfortunately there's no Macintosh version of CoPilot; Timbuktu is probably the next most usable solution, though the version I last used had overly-complicated setup and firewall issues to work around. VNC is free, but do you really want to put Grandma through the setup process? We love Grandma! I like the idea of CoPilot's web-based setup far better: it's a clean and simple solution, once you handle the inherent lameness in downloading and running programs. For now, I'll stick with Remote Assistance for Dad because its quicker and more stable for my application, but it wouldn't have even been possible without CoPilot. That was totally worth the 10 bucks...beats the price of an international plane ticket handily!
Just some quick updates to the forms, to update the year from 2005 to 2006. All other PCEO-related posts have been updated as well to point to the new 2006 editions.
The Standard Form has also been modified slightly to add more bubbles...I kept running out.
For more information, see The Printable CEO Series page. Looking forward to a great new year!
High Level Goals Tracking
» Download 2006 Standard
» PrintableCEO-CGT01-Standard.pdf
» Download 2006 MiniBook
» PrintableCEO-CGT01-MiniBook.pdf
» Download 2006 MiniBook Pages 1-2 / 5-6
» PrintableCEO-CGT01-MiniBook12.pdf
» Download 2006 MiniBook Pages 3-4
» PrintableCEO-CGT01-MiniBook34.pdf
» Download 2006 DuoSheet
» PrintableCEO-CGT01-DuoSheet.pdf
Task Tracking
» Download 2006 Task Progress Tracker
» PrintableCEO-TPT01-Standard.pdf
» Download 2006 Task Progress Tracker Destruct-o-Matic
» PrintableCEO-TPT01A-Destructo.pdf
I've mentioned Oblique Strategies in the past; it's a creative "I'm stuck! help!" tool devised by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt back in the 70s. But I didn't know there was a MacOS X Dashboard Widget available until just now!
Very cool!
Reader Robert K. Brown sent me a version of The Printable CEO he had meticulously recreated in PowerPoint. It's uncannily faithful to the original layout. Robert notes that the colors don't print quite the same, so downloaders may want to tweak them...because it's editable!
This is not a slide presentation, nor is it interactive; it's just easy to edit the PowerPoint slide for printing. If you used the Excel version in the past and wished it looked more like the PDF, then give the PowerPoint version a try.
I'm particularly impressed by his clever use of PowerPoint. I don't ordinarily use it because I've got Macromedia Flash and make custom presentations as part of my work. However, PowerPoint has come a long way, and while it doesn't offer the advanced capabilities of Flash, it's probably safe to say that it's the standard graphics application for business. I didn't even think of it when making that original Excel editable version of the PCEO. An important lesson! I've thought that maybe I should learn how to make cool Word templates too; we designer types get caught up in using our fancy tools that require fancy technology to make everything just perfect and eschew "everyday" tools like Microsoft Office. This doesn't have to be the case. I should really look more into the Office Suite to see what it can do.
Thanks Robert! You rock!
» Download PowerPoint Version
» PCEO-CGT01-RPK-PowerPoint.zip
scanned with Norton Anti-Virus 2005
Why Not Release Source?
I'm sometimes asked why I don't release the original Illustrator CS2 files to the public. Here's my reasoning:
- It goes against my instinct about releasing source files from being in the design business, though this might not apply here. The print designers I know are pretty careful about what they release, and if source files are involved they charge a hefty premium. Since I'm not making any money off of this, maybe it's a moot point.
- However, there may come a time that I do want to make something out of this, and therefore I want to maintain control over the appearance of the forms. So holding on to source is like a promise to myself that I'll do something cool with them later.
- In the meantime, it's kind of fun to think of other ways to distribute the PCEO concept using other media, the way Robert has. My thinking is to make a Flash version, but no one has really cried out for this so it remains on the back burner.
- For those of you out there thinking, "Hey, I have Illustrator CS2! I could use the source files!", did you know you can import PDF files directly into the program? Well, you can. It won't be as easy as editing the actual source since the graphics get broken down into vectors, but hey...you have Illustrator CS2...you already know how to deal with that!
- Or you can always hire me to make some quick modifications. I have reasonable rates ;-)
I'm really curious about how people choose their own priorities, so if you feel like sharing, please feel free to contact me or leave a comment. C'mon, it'll be fun! It will help guide future development too!
Yesterday I was musing about the unsatisfying quality of the Task Progress Tracker. My good friend Brad took the time to post some helpful comments. Among them was this gem:
[...] the “done” check box isn’t quite satisfying enough when a task is complete so I put a big fat Sharpie line right through the whole item. Makes me feel like I killed & conquered the task rather than just wounding it with a check mark as it runs away into the woods with it’s tail between it’s legs. :)
The hours and hours of Veteran's Day programming on the History Channel made me particularly receptive to Brad's tale, which led to an idea...
I give you The Task Destruct-o-Matic!
It's a refined version of the Task Progress Tracker, dressed up a bit to make it like you're really attacking the items on your to-do list. Booyah!
Here's how you play:
It's still the same 4 groups of 4 progress bubbles, except this time they're not marked with a "15-minute" label. You can still use them to represent 15-minute chunks of time, but now you have the option of having them mean whatever you want. Fill in the inside of the bubble whenever you make some significant progress. Fill in the whole graphic if you encounter more resistance than you expected; this replaces the challenge level in the old form. Don't forget to make an extra-cool noise when this happens!
There is a new initiate bubble. I found in the old sheet that I actually had to sit and focus for a bit to figure out just what I'd do first, then I could start filling out those 15-minute bubbles. It didn't feel right to fill in a bubble before I knew what the hell I was going to do, but I still wanted to. Think of it as a "Ok, I'm Really Ready to Start Now" bubble. I fill it out when I know exactly what my first action will be, and am ready-to-go.
When you finish a task, you can fill in the explosion at the end of the sheet. Use a red marker or something! Brad also uses a thick marker to cross-out the task, to kill it extra-dead.
If the task is incomplete by the time you run out of progress bubbles, use the fleeing guy icon to note that the task has been extended. Don't let it get away! Fill in another line and resume your assault! You can also draw the fleeing guy on fire if you want, to show what a good job you're doing.
Brad has been using different colored markers for each day of the week. With that in mind, I left this form black and white so the colors would jump out more.
I'm wondering if there's a good non-violent way of representing task completion? And in case you are wondering: yeah, this is silly :-)
Still, I'll be trying it out in the coming weeks---I'm going to be busy with billable work, so I'm stuck with this form until after Thanksgiving.
» Download 2008 Destruct-o-Matic PDF
» PCEO-TPT01-Destructo.pdf
For more background about the Task Progress Tracker, visit Much ToDo about Task Tracking.
And for more form madness, check out The Printable CEO™ Series page!
