Hi David,

I love the site, but I'm still a bit confused about the types of available forms, current versions, and how you actually use them in the course of a day, week, month, year. Let's tackle this in two sections:

1) The Printable CEO forms: I know you list the names of most of them on the "main" Printable CEO page (davidseah.com/pceo), but do you keep one page with a list of directly download-able, current versions of all of your forms? I've been browsing your site and it's like a mini game of scavenger hunt ;-) "Click here for the form, read the linked page, click here for history, click here for last year's version...."

2) I've read the history on most of your forms, checked out the various versions over the years, and it's interesting to watch the development. What I'm curious is which forms you actually use on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis. I've used FranklinCovey for the last three years - I combine paper and electronic planning - and I'm looking to integrate The Printable CEO into my current setup.

My Current Setup:

FranklinCovey PlanPlus for Outlook v5 - I use the "Home" page so I can see my e-mail, calendar, and daily task list all on one screen.

FranklinCovey PlanPlus utilities for PalmOS - Mainly used to keep my Palm synchronized for appointment reminders, but also somewhat useful for looking at current tasks when in a meeting.

FranklinCovey Monarch Planning Pages - Used to take daily notes, meeting minutes, etc. A notebook would probably do, but I like the "Monthly Index" for keeping track of important notes that happened during the month and the "Monthly Business Expenses" and "Annual Summary of Business Expenses" worksheets - useful for my business travels. Also used to house important phone numbers, service information, etc. in case the Palm stops working for one reason or another. (Read: I don't completely trust electronic devices)

My Proposed Setup:

Everything from my Current Setup

Task Progress Tracker - Used to roughly prototype a project before being transcribed into Microsoft Project (a necessary evil at my place of employment. Just like Outlook...)

Intermittent Task Tracker - Used for the weekly recurring important tasks to which I'm assigned, probably to be posted to my whiteboard

Task Order Up - Created as tasks come in, posted to the whiteboard, and updated in Outlook at the end of the day (boss uses Outlook to delegate tasks, expects employees to update those assigned tasks so he knows what's going on and where we are on our assignments at all times - Outlook handles this automatically when I make an update).

The one thing I'm trying to address is visibility in the workplace - While most of us use Microsoft Project for planning and Outlook for tasks - the boss doesn't do a good job of communicating what he's assigned to various members of the team. Therefore, several of us have inadvertently (so we think) been assigned the same tasks, which can be frustrating because you feel like you've wasted your time on duplicate effort. Using Task Order Up may address some of these issues because we can visibly see what everyone's working on, and address task overlap immediately.

How do you use your forms? What do you think of my existing and proposed setups?

Thanks!

Scott

Hey Scott,

Sorry for the LATENESS of this reply. To answer 1 and 2, I typically just use one form at a time, depending on what kind of focus I need. I suppose the general principle is that everything follows from that naturally. They have not (repeat, NOT) been pulled into a cohesive system. They are all individual experiments that share some strong similarities. I could arbitrarily systemize them, but I think that would be a false step.

I'd forgotten all about Intermittent Task Tracking...thanks for the reminder :-) Your system hypothesis of making everything more visible is a good one. You might look into editorial workflows also at magazines; they have tasks (articles) as individual units that move through the system. Freight companies also have the need to track cargo, and they have some interesting tool methodologies.

Maybe one thing you can do is pool your tasks together. The boss assigns you something, you note the essentials: dates, deliverables, dependencies, dropoff. You could write this on a small card or post-it note and initial/date it. Then you meet the rest of your team and see if there's overlap. Where they overlap, stick up the post-it note near each other in a group. Then the deliverables may be clear where they overlap. You can sort them roughly by date and dependency too. Patterns would emerge. Then, in your daily planning, you could choose what to do based on that emerging plan (assuming that the plan is of the emergent type). It may be interesting to visualize and manipulate.

Side note: Yes, the entire site is a mess...the organic growth is awful. I have a domain "theprintableceo" that will eventually house the cleaned-up version of the forms.