But aside from that, I wrote nearly a month ago about David Seah’s Printable CEO; it’s a system for tracking your progress by assigning more points for completing things that progress your career the most. I’ve been using the sheets to keep track of the things I’ve done for about a month now, and I decided that it was about time to draw some graphs and have a look at the pattern. They’re a bit rough and ready and were knocked up quickly, but because I want to bore the pants off you, here’s the mean number of items per points category, plotted by day of the week:
The interesting thing from my point of view is that it reflects exactly the opposite pattern than I thought it would. Before I started this, I imagined that Mondays and Fridays were my most productive—Mondays because I feel rested after the weekend, and Fridays because I’m trying to get things done in time for the weekend. What I can see from this graph is that I feel busier on those days because I’m doing a lot of fiddly little things rather than important things. Actually, in terms of important things, Tuesdays and Thursdays are the most productive, as you can also see from this graph (there’s also a lot of variability, as you can see from the whopping great standard error bars):
It’s been quite an interesting process, and has definitely changed my approach to work a bit.
1 While I’m on the subject of ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue’, last night’s ‘One song to the tune of another’ was an all-time classic: the words of ‘Teenage Kicks’ by The Undertones to the tune of ‘Jerusalem’. ↑