Your online CEO

Thanks to the crazy lives an increasing number of us are forced to lead, productivity and time-management are now more important words than they have ever been.

Thanks to the crazy lives an increasing number of us are forced to lead, productivity and time-management are now more important words than they have ever been. The Chinese manage to put things into perspective with this proverb: 'One cannot manage too many affairs: Like pumpkins in the water, one pops up while you try to hold down the other.'

This is why all busy corporate executivesu00a0-- and I use the word 'busy' rather loosely hereu00a0-- need to take a few pages from Dave Seah's book. They can do so literally, considering the Boston-based freelance communication designer is in the business of creating what he calls 'paper-based productivity tools'.

These include, for instance, a Compact Calendar for on-the-fly planning, an Excel template for creating quick Gantt-style charts, something called the Procrastinator's Clock, and a little gem he refers to as 'The Printable CEO'. While many of these are intriguing, and very helpful, the latter deserves more than a cursory glance because it has been adapted into a To-Do app called The Online CEO.

Seah says the idea came to him when he read somewhere that the most effective executives ask themselves a simple question: 'How can I add value to the company? If the task at hand doesn't, I should do something that does.' What he created, based on this question, was a form to motivate his business development activities.

Currently available free at a site called Roughunderbelly (.com), The Online CEO seems like just another random to-do listing service, except that a developer called Geoffrey Grosenbach has turned it into a little game. Users log in, create lists of things to do, then assign points to each depending on the importance of the task in question. They then go through their days trying to score the most points, simply by accomplishing the most number of things.

If it doesn't sound as exciting as, say, Farmville, you're probably just not that ambitious a person. This, in the grand scheme of things, is also perfectly alright.