Are you tired yet of hearing about the Seinfeldian chain? No? Excellent!
If you don’t know what the heck I’m talking about, you can read about Seinfeld’s productivity secret at LifeHacker.
The whole premise is that if you want to motivate yourself to do something, get yourself a big calendar, and mark a big red X on it every day that you accomplish that goal. The idea is to keep marking X’s, and to not break the chain. “Don’t break the chain”, says Seinfeld.
It’s a wonderfully simple idea, and thus has become quite popular in the blogosphere. It seems that every time I turn around, there’s another post in my feed reader about Seinfeld’s chain, or the Seinfeldian Chain, if you will.
Now, there’s even a cute online application that provides said big calendar, complete with red X functionality. The folks over at SmarterFitter allow you to create a web page for your very own chain.
But what if you don’t want to have a web page devoted to each and every chain that you might want to monitor for yourself. What if you want to see several goals at once? What if you just hate online apps? What if you have a secret, or not so secret, spreadsheet fetish?
Well, have I got a deal for you.
Inspired by the SmarterFitter web page, along with David Seah’s recent Excel Gantt Chart spreadsheet, I decided to make myself an Excel spreadsheet to hold multiple Seinfeldian Chains. Its layout is very much based on the old Lotus Organizer Planner view, which was great for seeing an entire year at once, with colour-coded blocks to show when you were on vacation, working on various projects, etc. (Man, I loved that software many years ago!)
Here’s what my spreadsheet looks like:
Note that I’m using Excel 2007, which means that I can make use of the diagonal lines inside a cell in order to make my X’s. If I recall correctly, the diagonals are new to 2007, but I could be wrong. However, even if you don’t have access to these diagonal lines, you can still make use of the spreadsheet. Instead of marking an X, just colour in the cell.
The reason I like working with Excel is that it’s so very versatile, especially where boxes and lines are concerned. All I did was:
- lay out the remaining months of 2007, one per row
- offset the first day of each month so that it starts on the right day
- use dark grey to shade in weekend days
- use light grey to shade in unusable cells
- insert the date numbers into each cell; using a smaller font, in a grey colour, makes it look like a real calendar
- play with the column width and row height so that each cell was approximately square
- separate all days of the month with thin lines
- outline the whole month’s days in a bolder line
- set the background colour for a big portion of my worksheet to white, so that I don’t see the grid lines
I’ve got one worksheet for 2007, plus another that just holds a blank version of the calendar. Now, when I want to add a goal to track, I just copy it from the “Blank” worksheet, and paste it under my other goals. This way, I can track as many goals as I like, all in one place.
You don’t even need to have a spreadsheet program - you can simply upload the xls file to your Google Docs (or any other online document application that handles spreadsheets) and make use of it there. That way, you can take all of your Seinfeldian Chains with you. Here’s what the spreadsheet looks like in my Google Docs:
I did have to recolour the weekends, since both the “unused” grey, and the “weekend” grey came out the same. Plus, I’ve turned the afore-mentioned diagonal line X’s into coloured cells. It’s actually easier to fill in a cell this way, than it is to add two new lines to it.
Downloads
I’m including both the xls and xlsx versions of the spreadsheet. The former will work with Excel 97-2003, as well as any other application that supports xls, e.g., Google Docs. The latter works with Excel 2007.
So, if you want your very own Seinfeldian Chain to customize as you see fit, download one of the files above and start playing with it!