power up for Pomodoro?
Asked by Chuck van der Linden:

Has anyone done a combination of Trello and Pomodoro Method for focused work time?

I'm using Trello for a [Personal Kanban](http://personalkanban.com/pk/) board, and also using [Pomodoro Technique](https://francescocirillo.com/pages/pomodoro-technique) to manage focused work sessions. I'd like to be able to track how many Pomodoro 'sessions' it takes for cards to be accomplished. Better yet I'd like to be able to estimate in advance to better plan what I might be able to accomplish in a day's work.

Right now I just use a checklist, which sorta works but isn't ideal. I looked but didn't see a power-up that seemed appropriate.

I'd be curious to hear if others are doing something similar, and how you are making it work for you.


Answers:
author: Meg Holbrook
body: Hey there!

Super interesting question involving two of my favorite methods!

The first thing I thought of as a low-tech solution that would take just a few minutes to implement would be by using a series of colored labels and each time you complete a session, you click the corresponding color - essentially working your way down.

![Capture.PNG](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/42999i59B0AF4FE0DE9411/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Capture.PNG")

Using each color once limits you to 10 sessions, but if you duplicated colors, you could get more. This also has the bonus that if you're working on one thing at a time, you can have the labels screen open and be clicking down the 'row' (since the label window stays open until you close it):

![Capture.PNG](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/43000i1A15B6FC8F0B45E2/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Capture.PNG")

I'll be curious to see what others come up with using more automation!

comments: author: Chuck van der Linden
body: in my case I'm already using the colors and such to tag items and categorize them in other ways. So that's not an option


author: Iain Dooley
body: [@Chuck van der Linden](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/2585568) if you want to first estimate how many sessions a card will take, then mark each session as it's done, a checklist actually seems pretty ideal to me, what don't you like about the way you have it set up currently? How would you like it to operate differently?

comments: author: Chuck van der Linden
body: So I already use checklists to break down larger tasks or enumerate steps etc.   

In that situation if I also use a checklist for tracking pomodoro sessions then the two get combined into one on the card 'face' when it's in lists view, and it's hard to tell progress on the checklist items apart from pomodoros..   

But for that, I would probably just use checklists and never have posted the question.

If having two checklists in a card resulted in separate icons when viewing the lists that would help..


author: Iain Dooley
body: [@Chuck van der Linden](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/2585568) Okey dokey, so rather than having a checklist of pomodoro sessions and a checklist of enumerated sub-tasks, start by creating a single checklist with all the steps/sub-tasks you might need to do then create a new checklist called "Session 1" and drag items into it, then create "Session 2" and drag items into it.

As you complete each session, any leftover tasks get dragged to the next session. You can add new sessions etc. Hide completed tasks in your session checklists so you only need to look at what's left.

Once you've created your session lists, you will have total progress shown on the front of the card, the only thing you won't have in that case is estimated number of sessions shown on the front of the card.

If this is important to you (ie. number of sessions rather than total list items), you could use a custom field with a dropdown from 1 - 10 so you set up your checklists, then you choose how many there are.

When you finish a session you can decrement this number, that way from the front of the card you can see total progress and number of sessions left.

You could also automate the bit that shows number of checklists on the card in the custom field, but I'd start off doing it manually to see how it feels/looks first, it's not that much overhead to just change the number as you go.


author: Nipun Aggarwal
body: Try this, maybe: <https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Trello-articles/Breaking-the-downward-procrastination-spiral-using-Trello-and/ba-p/1815366#M1468>  

Using Blocked Tasks in Trello, and deciding on the approach to take using multiple pomodoros on it


Tags: kanban

pomodoro