Productivity Tools Index
-Designed for paper-based workflows.
This is a collection of forms that you can download and print at home. Each form is designed to show your progress visually as you use it throughout the day, providing useful feedback about how well you are doing without a lot of annoying data entry or calculation.
FEBRUARY SPECIALS I'm doing a new idea every day marathon this month.
ETP Emergent Task Planner
DAILY A flexible day planning worksheet, focusing on 3 tasks at a time.
ETT Emergent Task Timer
DAILY Have a reactive schedule? See exactly where your time is going, quickly and easily.
TPT Task Progress Tracker
PROJECT Get the satisfaction of seeing where your effort is going, even on complex projects.
TOU Task Order Up
PROJECT Convert your projects into tickets that show your coworkers exactly what you have cooking.
CGT Concrete Goals Tracker
GOALS Focus on tasks that actually contribute to your goals.
DBG Day Grid Balancer
GOALS Stay mindful of the activities that contribute to overall life balance.
CCAL The Compact Calendar
PLANNING An easily-updated perpetual strip calendar that helps you quickly visualize and plan multi-week projects.
RTT Resource Time Tracker
PLANNING A method for tracking deliverables and allocating future time for multiple projects.
Manual GANTT Charting in Excel
PLANNING A simplified approach to creating GANTT-style schedules in Excel.
Doing Time in Excel
REPORTING An efficient timesheet for tracking time for multiple projects in 15-minute increments as you work.
FBO Fast Book Outliner
NOTE TAKING Create a book map as you read, so you can find the good stuff later!
About Dave’s Productivity Tools
In 2005, I started sharing my experiments in personal productivity on this blog, creating a collection of various printable paper forms I called The Printable CEO. The idea behind this was that as a freelancer, I didn’t have a boss telling me what to do. I thought it would be funny if I could print a CEO out and put it on my desk as a substitute. It actually ended up being very helpful, and I kept adding to the series over time to handle the different productivity challenges I faced.
Terms of Use
- Many of these forms are free to download for your private use, but I retain all copyright. Please do not upload them to other websites.
- I also sell a few versions of the tools as well, such as the high-quality printed versions on Amazon and specialized digital versions.
- I encourage people to adapt and modify the forms for further sharing, if you ask permission. Please contact me if you have any questions.
Other Forms
The following forms are not yet in the master index. I’ll add them at some point in the future.
- Academic Year Calendar – Customized for the US Academic Year starting around Labor Day. Ready to print!
- The Network Rainmaker – Sales starts as a numbers game, then becomes a relationship-building process. This form helps you see the relationship.
- Intermittent Task Tracking – Sometimes you have tasks that you do very infrequently. The idea behind this form is to capture the context of what you’re doing, and log the time.
- The Menu of the Day – Iron Chef Rokusaburo Michiba would take a few minutes at the beginning of each bout to write out his menu in brush calligraph before kicking ass in the kitchen. He said it gave him clarity before he started. That’s the idea behind this form. (NOTE: This form has been superseded by the Emergent Task Planner.)