Like bubbles? Loathe procrastination? Get your pencils ready.
Last week I was mindlessly surfing (read: avoiding work on an edit) and I came across freelance GUI designer David Seah‘s website and some neat paper-based productivity tools he designed.
My eye caught his Task Progress Tracker. Bubbles! I love bubbles!! My Q score‘s gonna slip down near Kevin Federline‘s for admitting this, but I always got a little thrill in school when they’d slap those standardized tests down on our desks, along with the #2 pencils, and tell us we had 50 minutes to fill those suckers in. I loved seeing the multiple rows of penciled-in ovals at the end of the test. I don’t know … something about the whole thing felt pleasingly productive. Probably because I knew the stark numbers my parents would get several weeks later wouldn’t be as attractive.
Which is why I fell in love with David’s bubble-based Task Progress Tracker. I printed a bunch of them out to help me stay focused on some projects I’ve been putting off. There are ten rows of 12 bubbles, along with space to note your hideous tasks. (This week it’s clean the house for visitors arriving on Friday. I *hate* housekeeping!) For every fifteen minutes you stay on task, you get to fill in one of the bubbles. That gives you four hours to finish each task.
I can see this tool being really helpful for someone who’s putting off writing an article or worrying about getting a proposal out the door. You could also use the sheet to challenge yourself (“I’m going to send out six queries this week, and if I fill in my six bubbles, I get to buy a new book!”).
So if you’re a bubble boy (or girl), go check it out. There are lots of other cool forms there, too — stuff for goal-setting and project planning. Let me know if you find this half as clever as I did! [db]
If you liked that post, you might also like:
Dec 4, 2006 Cool tools, Self improvement
