I am a huge fan of the productivity blog Lifehacker. I try my best to check out the site on a daily basis and am usually rewarded with a little tidbit or tool that helps to make my life much easier – it’s not all about Getting Things Done either. Recently, I read something on Lifehacker about Jerry Seinfeld’s Productivity Secret. The basic idea is that that way to get good at something is to do it every day. To that end, Jerry has a big full-year calendar on his wall and he crosses off every day in which he does his desired task – in his case, writing comedy. The key to success, Seinfeld says, is in not breaking the chain. With a big reminder like that in front of you, you will work really hard to challenge yourself to make as long a chain of days as possible.

Scoreboards

Figure 1: Tasks

When I read this I was encouraged to share the system I use which is really quite similar. I use my system, however, to work on creating more than one productive habit. I call them Scoreboards because, well, that’s what they are. I start by making myself a new spreadsheet – I use Excel but OpenOffice or another spreadsheet app would work perfectly fine. Down the first column I list the tasks I want to make into habits, leaving the first two rows empty for the month and day information. I then add a “Totals” entry to the bottom of the list. See Figure 1.

In the first row I place the name of the month and in the second row I place the days of the month. I like to highlight the weekends to set them apart but your mileage may vary. Figure 2 shows this header but only for the month of August, subsequent months would follow to the right up until the page break is reached. With the number of tasks I am currently working on I find that I can fit two scoreboards on a piece of 8.5×11 paper printed in landscape orientation and the one I am currently using has the end of August, all of September and most of October on it.

Figure 2: Date Header

This layout leaves a nice grid pattern in between the tasks and the dates. When you complete a task on a particular day, just fill in the box at the intersection of the task and the date. Personally, I like to print the sheets out and fill in the blocks but there is no reason why you couldn’t just change the background color in the spreadsheet and keep the whole thing online, in a Google Spreadsheet, for example. At the end of each day, put the number of tasks done that day in the Totals row. With the number of tasks that I am working on, I try to aim for 4 per day or better.

Why Do I Like This Better?

Figure 3: The board

Instead of using the number in the Totals row, I use different colors. I use green for making my target or better and then down through yellow, orange, red and black representing no tasks for that day. The scoreboard works on the same principle as the chaining used by Seinfeld, but with an added dimension. For tasks such as workouts which may follow a pattern other than every day, you can work to maintain the pattern for that task. Additionally, I find that the use of the colors in the Totals row provides some extra encouragement to get things done. If I am looking at my chart and am about to fill in a yellow when I have a chain of greens preceding it, that can often be the motivation I need to spend 20 minutes on a task that I would have ordinarily put off for another day.

Perhaps the thing I like best about this method is my ability to quickly tell how I am doing with my goals for a specific task or in general at a glance. In effect, this works for me like a Seinfeldian chain with a single goal: Be More Productive. As much as I wish I could leave things at a high level like that, I need more fine-grained control and motivation and by using Scoreboards, I have found a method that works exceedingly well for me. Hopefully it’ll work for some of you as well.