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I came across a really interesting productivity hack today, via 43folders (as ever). It’s called the Printable CEO, and it’s a kind of points system in which you reward yourself with a weighted score depending on how much that task has advanced your business (or in my case, my career). I keep track of my tasks and projects with my own software, Tracks, but I’ve always felt that—-while it really helps to keep my projects and next actions straight—-I don’t necessarily always get a feeling for what I’ve really achieved at the end of the week.

The idea of David Seah’s system is to guide you gently into doing more things that ‘grow your business’ (or career) each week, by awarding you more points for doing those important tasks, rather than the piffling drudgery that you have to do every day (though you get a small number of points for those too). Being aimed at geeks, the reward is to pencil in a little bubble next to the appropriate point score for each day, then count up your total points for the week. That might not sound like your idea of fun, but I’m getting a sad little buzz out of it. The results are already interesting.

I have two main problems with getting through my work¹:

1. I have big important stuff to get done that will advance my career (writing grants and papers, delivering dynamic, exciting, intellectually-challenging lectures to students—-ahem). However, I also have a huge pile of other routine—-but immensely time consuming and numerous—-tasks to do. I don’t imagine this is a situation unique to academia. I need to make sure that I do enough of the ‘big stuff’, while still wading through the flood of other tasks.
2. Sometimes it’s hard to make meaningful next actions that are small enough. ‘Write paper’ is certainly not a next action, but ‘write introduction to paper’ also doesn’t make much sense—-it’s just not the way you go about these things. I break the big tasks down a bit into meaningful chunks within a project, but it’s still the case that each of my ‘big stuff’ next actions takes a lot more time and effort than each of the ‘small stuff’ next actions.

That’s where this system really comes into its own. I can keep a constant check on whether I am actually progressing the important things, and at the same time, reward myself for work on moving forward one of the difficult and important next actions, even if I haven’t been able to tick the checkbox and mark it as done on that day. Balancing research and teaching is notoriously difficult, and I also see this as a valuable check on that particular tightrope act.

Of course, I had to change the descriptions of the points-worthy tasks a bit to make it more relevant to my own situation, but it still works well. In fact, re-writing the descriptions was quite an interesting task in itself.

¹ Well, OK, a lot more than two, but I’m trying not to depress myself too much. ↑