![]() The image below shows the new form on the right side. I missed the three tasks focus of the Emergent Task Planner.The sameness of the entire bubble field made it more difficult to find where I was in the day, particularly if I’d been away from the form for a few hours.I found myself wanting to write in-line comments near the bubbles I was filling in, as opposed to writing them down in the NOTES area.I was initially confused by the time marker positioning: “which bubble is 3:15PM?”.The old design is perfectly adequate, but I had the following issues (see image below, left side): ![]() After a couple of weeks, you’ll have the data you need to figure out what needs to change, and you can show your manager what the hell is really going on. ![]() The great thing is that you don’t have to add up any stupid numbers at the end of the day, and you’ll see the pattern of your time emerge as you are working. However, when I am sidetracked a lot, my bubbles get scattered around lower parts of the form. They’re easily counted for the daily total. When I am really focused, I’ll have solid lines of bubbles at the top of the form. Over the day, the “distracting activities” start piling-up at the bottom if I’m particularly unfocused. If I catch myself doing something that isn’t on the list-say, I catch myself surfing the Internet for examples of outdoor clay oven cooking-I add that item to the bottom of the list and fill-in the bubble. When I start the day, I list what I am supposed to do at the very top, and start my interval alarm. For example, when the alarm goes off at 3:15PM, I fill in only one bubble in the entire stack of tasks: the one that corresponds to 3:15PM, which is the first bubble in the group of four between 3PM and 4PM. By using an interval alarm that chimes every 15 minutes, we note which activity gets the bubble. Although there are multiple tracks, we can only focus on one task at a time. Each track represents a distinct activity. The ETT is a stack of “task tracks” containing 15-minute bubbles of continuous time. After a few days of using the ETT again I was surprised to find it wasn’t as easy-to-use as I remembered, so I’ve made an enhanced version to match my current design thinking. This is the older cousin of the Emergent Task Planner (ETP), and it was originally created so I could see where my time actually went in the foggy early days of my productivity journey. ![]() I’ve been using the Emergent Task Timer (ETT). We should have a new version of the A5 and US Memo (5.5×8.5″) up soon.I’ve been tracking my time to see if my “feeling unproductive” was supported by data as I wrote in the Assessment section of last week’s Groundhog Day Resolutions Review, it seemed possible that I was over-emphasizing the number of negative moments and creating a false sense of slackness. Thanks for anyone who can spare some time! So if you’ve got a desire to test, leave a comment here or shoot me an email via the contact form, and I’ll send you a fresh PDF to download from send you an invite to the the super-secret Design Prototyping Area (in Basecamp), where you can download the PDF and participate in the design discussion.įor North American users, I’d be interested in hearing what smaller paper sizes are most useful to you. I suspect some things might be too small, and people with binders may need additional space on the left-hand side for hole punching. I don’t use this size at all, so I’m wondering if anyone out there would like to give me early feedback on the design. I actually accidentally made the A6 version first, having read the wrong line of the ISO 216 paper size table, and was wondering why it looked so small…oops! There are two new form factors for the Emergent Task Planner: half-size A5 and quarter-size A6. ![]()
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