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About 6 weeks ago, I had some downtime and wanted to get focused on business-building activities…that’s how The Printable CEO came about. Since then, I’ve been a lot busier, so now I have a different problem: how to keep track of everything I’m doing and still keep moving on important personal projects that tend to fall by the wayside. In other words, I need more than task direction: I now need good old-fashioned task management, with a dash of motivational goodness.

The traditional approach, which I use with clients, is to break down the project into major phases for a production plan that details all the dependencies, dates, and deliverables. From this I create what is essentially a glorified To Do list, and get to work.

Now this works just fine, because maintaining a high level of client communication forces you to have some kind of progress to report! However, when it comes to my personal time, I’d rather be more free-form. Unfortunately, I tend to think of projects that are way too big for a single person to do in one free evening, so I…don’t do them. And this, my friends, is procrastination.

Intellectually, I know that it just takes determination: putting one foot in front of the other over and over again, until victory is just over the next foothill. But any procrastinator worth his salt has the uncanny ability to previsualize all the minutia that goes into a project, estimating with astonishing candor every bit of time, effort, heartbreak and disappointment it takes before anyone gets to sip from the Chalice of Higher Achievement. So taking that first step is awfully hard. When my faithful Tivo is stuffed to the gills with good TV and is just a remote-control click away, my resolve falters; laziness, as they say, always pays off right now.

I almost fell out of my chair when I realized that this was also the key:

Make achievement pay off right now, not later!

So I flipped the To Do List psychology upside down, applied bubble tracker methodology, and am trying something new. The first part of Printable CEO, The Concrete Goals Tracker, was all about establishing the right mindset. This second part, which I’m calling the The Task Progress Tracker, is about motivating you to invest time into specific projects in as unstructured a way as possible. The magical part is that it appears to help me create structure from the bottom-up, as a byproduct of using it. And that’s the ingredient that’s been missing from my regular To Do list.

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