Jana recently asked an interesting question relating to my progress log system – specifically about my modified version of the Printable CEO:

"My question: do you use your modified PCEO just for work-related activities or also for non-work goals (i.e., the activites to ensure 'balance')?"

The short answer is "It's mostly business", and to be honest I never really thought about adding many non-work activities to it. The "b-Alert" tracker takes care of making sure I'm balancing my day, and the PCEO gives me a way of measuring how productive I've been. So far it's helped overcome the problem of doing lots of small (and important) tasks and feeling like I've wasted a day, because I can look at the scores and see that I achieved a lot. I like that.

This question came at a good time, as I've recently modified some of the activities on my score card to reflect a slight adjustment in focus. I'll compare old and new, and walk through a few of the decisions I made when creating my score card.

Old vs New

The Old Way
10 Concrete project work
10 Direct income work
5 Blog or site article
5 Personal or business development
5 Publicly publishable code
2 Site promotion
2 Concrete business work
2 Project proposal
1 Volunteer project work
1 Misc. Contribution
The New Way

10 Concrete project work
10 Direct income work
5 Blog or site article
5 Personal or business development
5 Publicly publishable resource
2 Business promotion
2 Concrete business work
2 Volunteer project work
1 Misc. Contribution
1 Building/Strengthening a relationship

How I created the original score card

When I first started using the PCEO, I was a little unsure of what activities to use, so a lot of the points are similar to Dave's original system. Looking over them, you can see they're divided into four major sections:

  • "Visible" work – The high scoring activities are all visible work. "Concrete Project Work" can cover anything on a project, from documentation to coding some fancy particles.
  • Things of value – The next scoring band concentrated on things that are of value to other people, such as sharing source code or writing an article for the blog. It also covered business/personal development work, such as writing goals or creating something that helps with business work.
  • "Smaller" business tasks – "Concrete business work" covered most business tasks, such as tweaking the website, doing accounts or anything else not covered higher up the chain.
  • Contribution – I do volunteer work for the Scout Association, and I felt planning activities for that deserved rewarding on the PCEO chart. "Misc. Contribution" covers helping other people on forums or newsgroups.

The new and improved version

There aren't any radical changes, but I think the small tweaks I made will have a positive effect. I was quite happy with the original scoring, but I felt it had a few weaknesses which I've tried to address:

  • Promoting volunteer work – I removed the somewhat redundant "Project Proposal", and promoted volunteer work into its place, because I felt that I was neglecting this area a little.
  • "Strengthening/Creating relationships" – Going back to Dave's version, I liked the section on relationships. It's all too easy to overlook the important relationships in our lives, whether they're business or personal. Again, that's a weakness in my original system that I wanted to address.
  • Other tweaks – I changed the focus on a few items slightly. "Site promotion" went to "business promotion", and "publishable code" went to "publishable resource". This gave it a broader scope, and means there is a reward for sharing any resource of use, such as a template.

That's all folks!

So that's my PCEO scoring system in all its glory. If you're just getting started with the Printable CEO, it can be difficult to work out a way of scoring your activities, but hopefully seeing my version will inspire you to create something cool.

External Articles: David Seah - The Printable CEO