weblog.masukomi.org - productivity

The Daily Team Tracker Worksheet

2013-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

The Daily Standup Meeting is a core aspect of Agile development. The simplified idea is that you want to start the day with a very quick status check of what everyone’s working on, and helps “…to coordinate efforts to resolve difficult and/or time-consuming issues”.

But, how do you keep track of the things your minions are working on today and deal with your own tasks, and 400 daily interruptions? For me the answer was to put together the Daily Team Tracker Worksheet.

The idea is simple. Each morning, as you go through your Daily Standup write down what each person will be working on today. If they expect to complete the task today there’s a little checkbox to indicate that. There is, of course, another to indicate it’s done, a notes section, a place for emergent tasks, and more.

When 3pm comes around and I’m wondering, “What was Charles working on? Was he expecting to finish that today? Should I be checking in or leaving him alone?” I can check my sheet and see.

It’s also good to have prior days sheets because you can easily see that at task that was supposed to be done “today” has been on someone’s plate for three days now, enabling you say “Wait, weren’t you expecting to finish that two days ago? What’s gone awry? Is there anything I can do to help, or any lesson we can take from that?” (It’s all about the Kaizen baby). Some of that will, of course, be covered in your stand-up, but sometimes it’s good to have that reminder.

There are two versions of this:

Daily Team Tracker PDF (for teams of over 3 people).
- Page 1 is a the 3 person view with section for notes and diagramming.
- Page 2 has sections for 5 more folks with a mini notes / diagram section
Daily Team Tracker PDF 2 Sided (for teams of 3 or less)
- Page 1 and 2 are the same 3 person view so that you can print it on both sides of a piece of paper and save some trees.
Daily Team Tracker OmniGraffle file If anyone out there has OmniGraffle and feels like tweaking the original.

This file is (cc) 2013 K Rhodes ( masukomi.org ) and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Task Order Up!

2012-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been a big fan of David Seah’s Productivity Tools for a while now, but when it comes to task management his needs, and mine frequently diverge. As a freelancer he needs to track hours in a way that is totally irrelevant to me. He’s got no-one to answer to but his clients, whereas I’ve got a boss and coworkers who are asking for details on current and past tasks in ways that clients rarely do.

I’d seen his Task Order Up! sheets a while ago, but they just didn’t work for me. Upon revisiting his site the other week I had a little brainstorm. They could be just about perfect for me with a few tweaks. Throw in a couple office supplies and I’ve got a useful task management and archive system.

Task Order Up (re-imagined) - PDF

Requirements

must be able to show me exactly what I’m supposed to be working on now
must help me easily recap what I did in the previous week for my status report.
must help me out when the boss comes by and asks how I resolved that issue last week that I’ve entirely forgotten the details of.
must help me know who I need to talk to about a specific task

The System

I’ll cover the changes I made to David’s sheets in a second, but first I’d like to cover the system that transforms this from a glorified notepad into an extremely functional tool.

Now, David’s original idea was to use these similarly to how a waitress would take your order, put it on a little pad, go to the back and stick that sheet on a restaurant order check rail. It’s a good idea, but having a whole bunch of visible tasks is too distracting for me. I want my To Do list to show me exactly what I should be working on right now and keep me from pondering about all the other stuff. Also, I needed some system to be able to look back into the near past to answer questions about what I had been working on. Chefs don’t care what they made 30 minutes ago, they just care about what they need to cook now, and what’s coming down the line.

Four Stacks

In this system there are 4 stacks of Task Order Up! sheets:

A stack of blanks (silver binder clip)
A stack of tasks I’m currently assigned / working on (red binder clip)
A stack of tasks that I finished this week (yellow binder clip)
A stack of tasks that I finished last week (blue binder clip)

For the most part I don’t care about tasks that were completed at some point before last week, but for the odd occasion when someone does ask me about older tasks I take all the old ones and throw them into the “archive” which is actually just a larger black binder clip that lives on the back of the desk and holds the ever increasing stack. I could just as easily shove them in a drawer, but things in drawers may as well not exist to my brain.

The “current” stack (red binder clip) is prioritized, so the most pressing task is on the top, the next most pressing just below it, and so on. The completed stacks are prioritized by completion date (reverse chronological, like a blog) simply by virtue of the fact that new ones get added to the top.

Binder Clips

The color coded clips aren’t necessary, but I think they help. The clips keep the sheets together, should they accidentally get knocked, and the colors help me know which stack is which if they get moved around. This makes cleaning your desk much easier. Our office manager managed to find wee colored ones a little over a centimeter wide. If your office only has the larger binder clips you might want to go with colored paperclips instead. Most people don’t work on enough tasks in a week to exceed the holding capacity of a paperclip.

Flow

Tasks start on the left (with the stack of blanks) and proceed to the right as they pass through the stages (current, completed this week, completed last week). The archived ones from earlier weeks go somewhere out of the way.

Usage

New Task

Grab a blank.
Fill it out.
Put in in the current (red binder clip) stack.

Completing a task

Fill in the “Done” check-mark.
Move it to the top of the “completed this week” stack (yellow binder clip).
Start working on whatever’s on top of the “current” stack (red binder clip).

New Week

At the start of a new week your completed stacks are now a week too old and need to be shifted down the line.

Grab all the tasks that were completed two weeks ago (blue binder clip) and move them to the archive.
Grab all the tasks completed last week (yellow binder clip) and move them to the stack for tasks completed last week (the now empty blue binder clip).
Your “completed this week” (yellow) binder clip will just sit there waiting for you until you finish something. So get cracking!

The Task Sheets

Now David’s Task Order Up! sheet’s are pretty great, and if you need to keep track of billable hours his are definitely a better choice. “The System” will work with either, but my variant doesn’t have any hour tracking.

Other Changes

People

Across the bottom of the sheet is a “People” section, with a bunch of icons. If you’re a freelancer you could use this to indicate what client the job was for. If you’re putting these sheets on a shared board to keep track of what’s being worked on you could indicate the person the task has been assigned to. In my case I use it to note which of my coworkers have knowledge of that section of our codebase… who I should go to when I have questions.

The icons are intentionally simplistic so that, in your bored moments (translation: meetings), you can doodle little hats, faces, glasses, moustaches, and anything else on them.

Notes & Resolution

I’ve replaced the “Steps that need to be accomplished” with a generic lined field for “Notes” and “Resolution”. Sometimes I need to write down steps, but more frequently I need to write down notes, like what user encountered a bug, and how to replicate it. The “Resolution” lines are where I note how the issue was addressed, because people keep asking me. However, the “Resolution” text is intentionally light enough that you could write right over it and it wouldn’t hamper readability.

Job Code

I’ve brought the Job Code / Reference Number block up because our team, like many others, uses a web-based ticket system, and I need to be able to easily associate the task with its identifier in the system, or vice-versa if someone asks me about ticket #4238.

Done Check

I’ve added a little checkmark to the right of the Due Date field, so that when you finish your task you can fill in the check and enjoy that satisfaction of a job well done… and give yourself a nice visual indicator of which tasks have been finished.

Features from David

When’s it due?

David’s provided a couple useful ways for tracking when a task is due. Use whichever one works best for you.

The Due Date field is pretty much what you’d expect; a place to put the date the task is due.
The Week Num: If this is a multi-week project you can write the week number it’s due in, and then circle the….
Days of the Week: Circle the day of the week its due on, and AM or PM if it matters.

Due Date’s aren’t generally an issue for me. It’s ASAP for almost everything, but when there is a due date it’s generally in the same week and I’ll just circle the day of the week rather than trying to figure out what that date is.

Brainpower

David did all the heavy lifting here. My version wouldn’t be possible without his creative shoulders to stand on. Go to his site, check out his stuff.

git status-report

2010-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

Every week I, and millions of developers like me, have to put together a status report for our bosses, letting them know what we’ve been up to for the previous week. Like most of the developers I’ve encountered I’m always a little unsure of what *exactly* I was working on, and typically I just open up git to see what commits I made, and try to remember any non-code stuff I’ve Thinking it was silly to keep wading through everyone’s commits for the past week to see what I worked on I’ve put it all together in a script (in Ruby) called git status-report, which you can grab from github here.

It outputs a bullet list of all your commits for the past n days, or the commits of one of your fellow contributors. I think I’ll find the latter a great way to keep up on what other folks on my team are working on at the moment.

Usage: git status-report [-e <email>][-d <days>]
Generates a status report for what you worked on for the past n days.
    -a, --all                        Displays output for all contributers sorted by person
    -b, --branches <branch name>     Limit results to work found in the specified branch(es). 
                                         Multiple branches can be comma separated
    -c, --current                    Generates status report for the current repo only
    -d, --days <num days>            The number of days to generate the report for. Defaults to past 6 days (one week)
    -e, --email <email address>      The email address of the committer to generate a report for. 
                                         Defaults to your "git config user.email" address. 
                                         Multiple email addresses can be comma separated.
    -f, --files                      Display a list of files involved in the commit(s)
    -h, --help                       Displays this message
    -r, --reverse                    Displays output in reverse chronological order
    -s, --simple                     Simpler output. Doesn't include the dates
    -v, --verbose                    Verbose output includes details on each commit

Please don’t hesitate to fork the repo on github and make improvements. I’ll happily merge them in to the main one. git-status-report supports will check for commits in all the branches and supports multiple repositories. Check the README for full details.

Three Useful Task Sheets

2010-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

Almost five years ago I wrote a self organizing todo-list application. It was ugly, but worked really well. Unfortunately for me, I really prefer writing my todo lists out on paper. I like the simplicity of it, ideas just flow out through my pen. I can make notes and draw little arrows connecting things. And, I can make really satisfying check-marks in boxes when I’ve finished something.

Paper’s just the right medium for me, and I know I’m not the only one. So, I created a paper version of that self organizing todo list, and every few months I find some little thing I can do to improve it. Now I’ve got three different forms which I’ll cover below:

A Simple Checklist Sheet (OmniGraffle, png, tiff)
A Self-Prioritizing And Time-Tracking Todo list (OmniGraffle, png, tiff)
A Manager’s Planning Sheet (OmniGraffle, png, tiff)

(Why no PDF? Because the font placement is critical on some of these and Windows screws it up.)

If you find these types of forms useful be sure to check out David Seah’s excellent Printable CEO series, which inspired these so many years ago. [Update] There’s now a fourth sheet to check out too. MyMacro Micro Checklist.

A Simple Checklist Sheet

This sheet is simple and flexible enough to be useful to just about everyone.

The header has a place for the project name or some other context that connects the tasks you are working on: “Project X”, “Homework”, “Enemies of the State”… stuff like that. And, if you’re the type who keeps your tasks lists around for a while there’s a place for the beginning and ending date of the project, or maybe just the dates you started and finished the tasks on the page; whatever works best for you. I usually use it to indicate what week the tasks were for. This can be useful if you need to go back and see what you did last week for a status report.

After the header, the first thing you might notice is that everything else seems a bit faint, especially when you print it out. This is on purpose. As you can see in the example here, the lightly dashed boxes at the start of each line are there just to act as guides for your own check-boxes and practically disappear once you actually start writing. The three boxes allow for a hierarchy of tasks three levels deep, and there’s no reason you couldn’t easily draw boxes farther in if you really need it, but in practice I’ve never had the need.

At the right end of each line there are three more items in an equally faint gray: a place for a due date, a box to record the total hours spent working on it, and an exclamation point. The first two are pretty self explanatory, but they’re in a similarly faint gray so that you can just write over them if you need the space and don’t care about recording that info on the current line. I do this all the time and I’m happy to report the gray is light enough to not get in the way there either. The exclamation point is not so obvious. It’s for calling out items that you need to come back to later for whatever reason. In my case, I use it to mark items that I’ll need to discuss at the postmortem meeting we’re having the end of each release.

A Self-Prioritizing & Time Tracking Todo List

[![Task Sheet

Screenshot](http://s3.amazonaws.com/mobtvse_masukomi/assets/2010/02/task_sheet_v2_4_screenshot.jpg “Task Sheet Screenshot”)](http://s3.amazonaws.com/mobtvse_masukomi/assets/2010/02/task_sheet_v2_4_screenshot.jpg)

This one consolidates a lot of information in every line and is going to require some explanation. It is most useful for people who want a system to help prioritize tasksand want/need to keep track of the time they’ve spent working on them. The grid at the left of each row has four columns “i”, “e”, “t”, “c” for “Internal Importance”, “External Importance”, “Technical Feasibility” and “Creative Feasibility”

Internal Importance: how badly do you, or your group, want this task completed. The more you want it the more you fill up the bar.
External Importance: how badly does your client, or customer, want this task completed. The more they want it the more you fill up the bar.
Technical Feasibility: how easy will it be to actually do it. The easier it will be to do, the more you fill up the bar.
Creative Feasibility: how easy will it be to figure out what you need to do to complete this task. The easier it is to figure out the more you fill up the bar.

Some examples:

Creating a logo is creatively a pain in the butt (short “c”), but technically quite easy (full “t”). If it’s for a client it’s something externally important (full, “e”) but typically internally not very important (empty “i”). Creating a logo for your own company would be internally very important but externally not important at all.

Getting a logo design from another department is technically trivial (full “t”), creatively trivial (full “t”), and internally important important to you (mostly full “i”), but unimportant externally (empty “e”) because no-one cares that you got it from another department, they just care that you have it.

How much you put in each column is a judgment call, just fill in however much feels right. Once you’ve got them filled in you can just scan down the pending tasks for the one that’s darkest. Items that are quick and easy to get out of the way will have their right halves mostly filled in. Items that are important to get done will have their left halves filled in. Items that are quick, easy, and important will be almost entirely filled in. So, really you’ve got three ways to look at it, and none of them require much thought. The thing you should do first is the one that’s got the most black. But if you’re just looking for something you can whip out quickly when you don’t have much time to work, you can just look for something with a dark right side. Some people like to count up the number of squares they’ve filled in and then do the task with the biggest number.

Some tasks are related, or dependent upon other tasks. That’s where the little circles to the left of the grid come in to play. In the example you can see that a couple of the items have their circles drawn over and a line drawn between them. The parent task is typically the top one and the line between them shows you that they’re connected… literally.

You’ve got two lines for each task, as well as a notes space to the right for details you think up later and a big check-box you can fill in when you’ve finished the task.

Beneath the text lines there’s a blue line filled with lots of little boxes. These are for tracking how much time you spent working on each task and what day you worked on it. You’ll note that there are only four boxes per day (actually three boxes and a circle). This is for two reasons. The first being that we rarely have more than four hours a day to devote to any one task and the second being that if your tasks are taking more than four hours each you’ve probably not broken them down to sufficiently fine-grained level. The last box is a circle simply to help visually separate each day’s boxes. There are seven days worth of boxes but you’ll note that the last two (Saturday and Sunday) have faint edges. This is because you need some time off. Go have a life and endeavor to never need fill these in. It’s a little hard to see in the picture but in the example the first task was worked on for two and a half hours on Wednesday.

After the boxes you’ll see a “due / / “ section were you can note a due date if the task has one.

A Managers Planning Sheet

Next up we’ve got a planning version for of that last one for manager-types. The idea is that managers will be assigning tasks at a much higher level, and the people actually working on them will divide them up into “bite-sized” pieces.

The header remains the same, but the prioritizing aspect of each task has gone away and been replaced with a due date. The hours are no longer tied to days since many tasks, at this level, will span days and are purely there for estimation purposes. You can fill in the hours boxes like a big horizontal thermometer. Alternately you can use it to estimate days. When the task is completed you can go back and fill in the “total” at the end to see how your estimates stood up against the time it actually took.

The circles to the side of each task are exactly the same as in the Self-Prioritizing version, and are for connecting related tasks.