(last edited on April 29, 2014 at 1:28 am)
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 :-)
5 Comments
The first link says and links to “Blue Favor” instead of Blue Flavor…
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oops :-)
That’s OK Dave, I think the IRS did the same thing…
Dave, I am wondering if we can quote you on “a kick-ass application of the PCEO” for our marketing and sales material. Ok, in all seriousness, glad you liked the timesheet.. now if we can just figure out a printable OS and web browser…
Nick: Heh, glad you liked the comment…it’s really awesome work you guys did.
PrintableOS and PrintableWebBrowser… what, are you throwing down a challenge? :-) With a little clever semantic trickery and slight of hand, you might get something…
PrintableOS…would have to think of what an OS is, and how it’s seen by the particular user. From the CPU perspective, it’s largely a scheduler and resource manager. Basically, an organizer. I could imagine a number of turing-like lists of things to do that represents threads, with an pencil-able instruction pointer that allowed certain jumps between the lists so long as “atomic” actions were allowed to go to completion. That would be pretty damn cool. Maybe a new way of tracking a process that can branch, and it might look cool on long strips of paper…
PrintableWebBrowser… That’s easy! Print a web browser frame, cut out the middle, and hold it in front of you :-D Sort of like the National Geographic frame. Maybe that’s more of a Printable World Browser, though :-)
Ok, ok…maybe not quite what people were thinking