Pomodoros and the To-Do list
Date: 2013-02-25 23:33:34

http://www.annashipman.co.uk/[Anna] and I were recently discussing the way that we get things done outside of work and since December I've been fairly religiously working through various 'to-do' lists with a pomodoro timer.

So far I've done 308 30 minute pomodoros in about 8 weeks which is just under 20 hours a week which is not bad but still leaves time for a ridiculous amount of procrastination.

These are some of the things that I've noticed from only doing things when it's explicitly on a timer:

== I waste a lot of time

I haven't been keeping track of how many pomodoros I've been doing each day but the http://www.timetrackerproapp.com/easypomodoro/[Easy Pomodoro] app which I've been using to track my time allows me to see how many pomodoros I've done on a task so I have a rough idea.

On some days I've managed to go from 8pm to 1am and only done 3 pomodoros which leaves an impressive 3 1/2 hours of Facebook, twitter, gmail time.

I did try the https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stayfocusd/laankejkbhbdhmipfmgcngdelahlfoji?hl=en[StayFocusd] application for a few weeks but it becomes really annoying when you do legitimately want to chill out!

== Things need to be deleted from the 'to-do' list

The first to-do list I created had around 10 things on it initially and I added every new thing I wanted to do to it until I had around 25 things on the list and yet had only completed 3 of the original 10 things.

My rough rule of thumb is that if I re-write the 'to-do' list twice and the same item is still there then it gets deleted because I clearly don't have the motivation to do it!

I thought I'd find it frustrating to delete things from the list but it's actually more relaxing to know there's a shorter list of things I'm actually interested in doing.

== Once I get into something I spend ages doing it

I've been tracking how many pomodoros I spent on individual tasks and when sorted I've spent 12 pomodoros on average on the tasks in positions 2-7.

The item in position 1 is me http://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2013/02/24/neo4jcypher-combining-count-and-collect-in-one-query/[playing] http://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2013/02/19/neo4jcypher-using-a-where-clause-to-filter-paths/[around] http://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2013/02/17/neo4jcypher-sql-style-group-by-functionality/[with football data] which I've written about previously and has taken up 36 pomodoros or 18 hours of time in the last couple of weeks.

I generally try to spend my spare time learning new things but in this case most of it has been spent cleaning up/manipulating data into a format that I can do something useful with.

== It's now clear when I'm giving up without really trying

One of the habits I've been trying to shake is that I often give up learning something if I'm not able to grasp the basics reasonably quickly.

Timing things on a pomodoro has made it visible how quickly I tend to reach that state and when I see that I've only been trying to understand the topic for 1 hour it does make me realise how ridiculous I'm being.

It does seem to motivate me to try for at least a few hours and varying the approach before deciding that a topic maybe isn't for me at least for now!

I http://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2012/01/22/playing-around-with-pomodoros/[last wrote about pomodoros about a year ago] and it's interesting to see that I've covered almost completely different things than I did last time!

I'm not sure exactly what that means but I'd recommend them as a tool for fighting procrastination at the very least!