A friend recently pointed out David Seah’s fine Print­able CEO Series. The series is a set of print­able tools he has pro­duced for sched­ul­ing, plan­ning, and esti­mat­ing activ­i­ties or projects. The set includes time-tracking tools to help keep on track with var­i­ous tasks and record time for later billing. I think my favorite in the set is the Emer­gent Task Plan­ner.

I think the series is a bit of a mis­nomer, as the util­ity of these tools is hardly lim­ited or specif­i­cally directed at the CEO… really, any­one who has to man­age their own time can make good use of them. There’s a fair bit of mate­r­ial to read through as Seah out­lines his logic and some of the method­ol­ogy for using them. I think for the most part they’re quite self-explanatory to any­one who’s at all famil­iar with such tools, but see­ing the logic for their devel­op­ment and some of the usage exam­ples is quite help­ful. I thought his cri­tique of the short­com­ings of the GANTT chart were insight­ful. As for the Emer­gent Task Plan­ner, my last posi­tion and duties filled my day with an imbal­ance of ongo­ing projects and tasks punc­tu­ated by interruption-tasks and projects, the kind that reg­u­larly landed on my plate and needed deal­ing with, but which I would have no idea were com­ing at the start of the week. The Emer­gent Task Plan­ner helps make sense of those kinds of things and helps keep you from drop­ping other things as you add to your plate. I wish I’d had this when I really needed it… but in the end we devel­oped a web-based soft­ware pack­age which works quite well for man­ag­ing tasks, projects, and for track­ing and billing time.

I’ll be down­load­ing the set of tools and using the ones I can, but from what I’ve seen so far I can already rec­om­mend the series.