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.

• Emergent Task Planner — Enhanced!