Living On Codes

At the age of Facebook, emails, SMSs, instant messages, phone calls, twitter, blogs, reddit and what not other distractions it is difficult of keep your mind focused at the task at hand. It may sound over disciplinary, but many times I wanted to track my focus on a certain job that I’m working at so that I can judge my performance later on. Sometimes I even started a stopwatch to keep myself on track so that my attention doesn’t deviate away from the task at hand. But recently I found myself falling back on a circle which kinda looks like this:

 
As I was reading my daily updates (another distraction?) at http://reddit.com/r/programming, I found this interesting technique from the reddit programming help page which I think can boost my productivity at lot if I follow this wisely. The technique is called Pomodoro. It’s basic concept is you break down a task to the level of completing it chunk by chunk basis. Each chunk called pomodoro will consist 25 minutes of full focused effort without any lengthy distractions. After each effort you must take a break of 3 to 5 minutes. You don’t allow any distractions when you are on a pomodoro, and if you are distracted for long enough (more than 15 seconds?) then you have to invalidate that pomodoro session and start again hoping next pomodoro will go better. You repeat it until the task is done and if you go on like this, the general rule is a task should not be too big that it takes more than 6/7 pomodoros. You are also suppose to take a 20-30 minutes break after each 4 sessions of pomodoro which will ensure a healthy work habit.

You start by creating an activity list. You fill up your daily to do list from your list of activities. One important improvement you can make if you follow up your daily tasks and record your pomodoros and estimates on your Recording Estimates chart as mentioned on the book available at the pomodoro site.

I really like this simple tool (MacOS based) named also pomodoro hosted at github. As I’m mostly comfortable using electronic notebooks I use excel sheets to keep my todo, activity, and recording estimate lists. So far it is proving really effective technique to improve my productivity and I hope it will sky rocket your productivity too if you follow it properly. I highly recommend reading the eBook provided at the pomodoro technique site to help you get started with your productivity boost.