Franklin returns

back at the factory, one of the straws that broke this camel’s back was the introduction of a “personal productivity tool” called, innocuously enough, the myFranklin. named after the much-touted franklin planner that many factory higher-ups swore by, it was reconstituted from a thick black zip-up daybook into an excel spreadsheet with a dizzying number of cells, which we had to fill up with word counts and hours (or fractions of hours) we spent achieving those word counts.

image from www.geek.com

a number of us lower-order drones used the actual franklin planner, but the staid black, zip-up bible-like casing scared me – i felt my stubborn loyalty to my lonely planner would save me from being thoroughly assimilated by the factory. if the franklin planner in its book form gave me the heebie jeebies, its electronic incarnation had the power to draw blood from the very pores of my scalp.

here was something that literally forced our work, our skills, our very art (if you’re the type to take your profession as your art) into miniscule boxes and numbers that were forced lower and lower (well, lower for man-hours and higher for word counts), all in the in the name of the two-faced factory god, “personal productivity.” i say two-faced because way even after i left, nobody had yet come up with the brilliant plan that would transform all those cells and decimals into an actual, actionable productivity strategy. (j, meron na nga ba?)

anyway, why am i bringing up such a horrid memory? ironically enough, it’s because, in a way, the myFranklin has followed me to my new digs. my creative sanctuary, my wonderful office, with mucha and michaelangelo splashed on its walls and ceilings, has been invaded by the deadly excel sheet! aaaugh!

this time, though, the time-tallying is for a behemoth-wide efficiency audit, and the make-your-own-format spreadsheet is called, for lack of a better term, the daily diary. after the token rebellion, we creatives decided to hunker down and fill up those damned spreadsheets because, well, they aren’t really limiting or violating – they’re simply out of character for a workplace like ours. personally, i felt that unlike the myFranklin, the underlying objective and productivity strategy gave birth to the tool, and not the other way around. and i’m all for that.

plus, the daily diaries started to look even better when we realized we could use them to inform the powers-that-be of the inefficiencies that make our lives hellish. especially the ones that look like this –

2:00pm-6:30pm forced break (waiting for video material)
actual excerpt from my daily diary

so while some of us have to get our creative skills cracking (“mentoring”, “research”, “field work” and “brainstorming” now take up a *cough* significantly larger chunk of our time), it’s all good for now. i’m on the side of anyone or anything that wants to get me home earlier.