Black Belt Productivity

I am pleased, and excited, to announce that I will be assisting David Seah of the Printable CEO (PCEO) develop a list of general Concrete Goals for the IT industry for use in the Printable CEO.

For those not familiar with the PCEO, it is a series of forms that David has created to “focus [his] time more productively.” [emphasis his] His area of expertise, and the focus of the original PCEO, is the freelance new media business. Currently there are five parts to the PCEO:

1. Concrete Goals Tracker - this helps identify the tangible items to move you forward towards your goal.
2. Task Progress Tracker - the Project Manager piece; helps you focus on individual tasks
3. Emergent Task Timer - task tracking for all the other times when you are not working on specific goal-oriented tasks
4. Task Order-Up - a task ticket that puts all of the information that you need in one place; comes from the short order cooks of old
5. Network Catch-o-Matic - the Networking piece; helps keep track of all of the people that you meet day-to-day and gives you steps to get to know people

To start this process, we are going to try to define what IT is. There are so many parts to IT, that it may be necessary to drill down even farther. I am a Network Adminstrator (in practice) so my goals will differ greatly from a Chief Information Officer or a Database Adminstrator. In reality, I am an IT Manager since I am the only one that does the computer stuff, and I get the fun tasks of writing policies, and researching purchases.

David is also a GTD’er, and also a procrastinator. You can read his thoughts on GTD in his Taking a Look at Getting Things Done post. He states:

While I creep on some of the same ideas that David Allen defined 20 years ago in his corporate training programs, it looks like my emphasis is compatible but different. That’s a huge relief. And since discovering GTD through other blogs referring to my original articles, I’ve been delighted by the tremendous sense of community that’s formed around the very idea of being more productive.

I see that the Emergent Task Timer is a great tool to limit or eliminate procrastination. It breaks down your day into 15 minute increments so that you can see exactly what you are spending your time on. There is an online version available at his site also.

I am looking forward to hammering out the IT Concrete Goals. It will give me a chance to really sit down and think about big piture IT issues that I do not normally think of. If anyone has any ideas to help us gets these goals in place, please drop me a line at michael@blackbeltproductivity.net.

- Michael