Scoring points
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:
- 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.
- 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. â
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Thanks for writing up your experience! I believe you're the first person to actually do so, and you've done a better job of explaining the whole "chunking" problem than I. Very cool!----- What with all this geekery, list making, scheduling, organising the lists of schedules that you make with your whizz-bang, nifty bits of software, when do you get time to work?
Where's the emoticon for tongue-in-cheek?
by Jonathan Briggs @ 19/10/2005 12:10 pm • Permalink •
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Dave Seah: Well thanks for producing such a great productivity hack! One of the interesting things is that it's making me realise that I get a lot more accomplished in a day than I thought. It's amazing what you forget about, particularly if you haven't managed to check something off. Lots of positive reinforcement, which is great. I might even get ¨ber geeky and graph my point score week by week
Jonathan Briggs: I think the emoticon you're looking for is :-^ But seriously, it is a potential pitfall because there's nothing geeks like more than tinkering with the system. But if it doesn't take much time, energy or thought to do, it's not too disruptive and the positive feedback makes a big difference.
by bsag @ 19/10/2005 4:10 pm • Permalink •
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> What with all this geekery, list making, scheduling, organising the lists of schedules that you make with your whizz-bang, nifty bits of software, when do you get time to work?
When it's work time!
This is fun-time.
If you look at this as "non-productive work", you have the wrong filter on. This is a hobby! This is fun! And it's one of my social outlets...sharing and writing about things of interest to like-minded folks feels good. I suppose I could be bowling in a league, or perhaps watching the game, or picking out new patterns for re-wallpapering the bathroom instead, but I would rather screw around with graphics software and productivity concepts.
Bsag: if you graph, what kind of curve fit will you do?
I was thinking about it myself, and thought I would model the curve such that the points-per-day were like impulse inputs to a system that decayed over time, maybe using a 1.5 day window. The idea is that sustained input would tend to push the graph into a higher state than simple point plotting IF the effort was sustained on a day-to-day basis. Not sure if this makes sense, and my math sucks so I am not sure how to express it symbolically. Sigh.
by Dave Seah @ 19/10/2005 11:10 pm • Permalink •
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Dave Seah: I'd be pretty lucky if my curve fit made it to linear
. I like your idea of some kind of moving average thing. I think that's probably what you want, if I've got the idea of what you're suggesting. I was thinking of looking at the average composition of points types across weekdays, as well as just tracking the total number of points over time. I have a suspicion that I'm more productive in terms of important difficult work at the beginning or end of the week (I'm not sure which), so I wanted to check it out. I sometimes have a spurt on Friday, which I suspect is down to wanting to feel like I've achieved something by the weekend.
by bsag @ 21/10/2005 8:10 pm • Permalink •
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