Productivity Tools

This is a collection of productivity tools I’ve been developing since 2005. You’ll find that they address a number of different needs. Pick the one that seems to fit your mindset and your needs and give it a try for a couple of weeks.


Calendar Tools

"Compact Calendar"

  • The Compact Calendar – The popular “candy bar of time” calendar that is useful for on-the-fly planning and note taking. Customize in Excel and print, or print one of the six styles of PDF. The Compact Calendar is available in many languages thanks to the efforts of translators around the world. Updated for 2012!

  • Academic Year Calendar – Customized for the US Academic Year starting around Labor Day. Ready to print!


Simple Project Tracking

"My Gantt Chart V2"

  • Manual Gantt Charting in Excel – This is a template I made for making “project management graph paper” in Excel. It’s not intended to replace real project management software, but I find it’s good enough for creating quick Gantt-style charts you can print out or include in a report. Just enter the start date and it generates the cells you need. With explanatory video!

  • Time Tracking in Excel – When I’m actively keeping a timesheet for purposes of billing, I often fall back on this Excel spreadsheet to track multiple projects and track hours for the entire year. I like this one because I can enter in an entry like 1545 work on project 1700 and it will automatically calculate the fractional hour without me having to type start and end time in separately.


Task Management

"Concrete Goals Tracker"

The Printable CEO™ Series is a bunch of productivity tracking forms, tackling high level goals to low level detail tracking.

  • The Emergent Task Planner – Every morning, write down the three things you need to do; this form helps you manage that in the face of all the distractions that will beset you by helping you visualize the day and how long things will take.

Emergent Task Planner I also have high quality 75-sheet printed pads available on Amazon USA.

For Europe and other countries (A4 size), we’ve set up a European Store to handle international orders.

  • The Concrete Goals Tracker – This point-based focusing list encourages strategic thinking about what you’re really doing to move yourself forward.

  • The Task Order-Up! – Inspired by short order cooks, this design breaks your tasks into “task orders” that you can put up by your workstation. You can prioritize your tasks visually, and the people around you can also visualize your queue.

  • The Emergent Task Timer – This helps you see where your time goes. Great for grad students and people who need to show their bosses how much distraction they’re facing.

  • The Task Progress Tracker – Need to break down a complex project into a series of steps? This form helps you define, estimate, and track time against it. The The Task Progress Tracker – Destruct-o-Matic Version makes unpleasant tasks a bit more silly.


Process Tracking

"RTT"

  • The Fast Book Outliner – Designed to help me outline the content of a book more quickly away from the computer. The forms have page numbers pre-printed on them, allowing you to note what you are discovering on a kind of book map that can be reviewed and refined over several passes.

  • The Resource Time Tracker – A two-part form for managing available time in the future, based on deliverables, resources, and dates. It’s the sort of thing you would use if you were booking projects in the future, and didn’t have a computer.

  • PENDING UPDATE The Network Rainmaker – Sales starts as a numbers game, then becomes a relationship-building process. This form helps you see the relationship.

  • PENDING UPDATE Intermittent Task Tracking – Sometimes you have tasks that you do very infrequently. The idea behind this form is to capture the context of what you’re doing, and log the time.

  • The Menu of the Day – Iron Chef Rokusaburo Michiba would take a few minutes at the beginning of each bout to write out his menu in brush calligraph before kicking ass in the kitchen. He said it gave him clarity before he started. That’s the idea behind this form. (NOTE: This form has been superseded by the Emergent Task Planner.)


Life Balance / Big Picture Worksheets

"Day Grid Balancer"

  • Updated for 2011! The Day Grid Balancer – Experimental forms that focus on the question of “life balance”, with editable Adobe Illustrator files released under Creative Commons License.

  • The Plain Old 5-Day Planner – Someone wanted a “plain” planner without all the fanciness of the Emergent Task Planner, and so I made this.

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