BlackBox

Ok, here is week 2 as promised of my “30 Day Experiment with Pomodoro” (Part 1 – Why I’m doing this, Part 2 – Week 1 recap). This covers Friday, Oct. 30th – Thursday, Nov. 5th. First, I want to say that I am really enjoying Pomodoro, because I feel like I am actually getting more done before than I was when I wasn’t using Pomodoro. And I now have a much better feel for when I should be getting task at hand done instead of just surfing, checking email, etc. On a side note, I’m surprised that no one around me has said they want to strangle me because of the beeping kitchen timer (although, someone did tell me to get back to work when my 5 minute break was over). I’m glad I decided to keep using the timer and it helps to keep me on track and aware of how much time I’m spending on things – 5 minutes goes so fast!

Week 2 Scheduled and Unscheduled Pomodoros with Completed Tasks

The first graph is again my scheduled, unscheduled and completed tasks. For this week there were a few instances where the unscheduled tasks equaled or outnumbered the planned tasks. I need to figure out a good way to work with a group of people on a project using Pomodoro – that’s my major sticking point right now. It works really well when two of us are doing pair programming, but starts to fall apart when there’s frequent questions one of us has for the other and we’re not working together.

Week 2 Pomodoros Internal and External Interruptions

The second graph tracks my interruptions. This week I added in a new metric to track – Interrupted Pomodoros, for when a Pomodoro has been completely broken by interruptions (either internal or external). In this graph it is easy to see the correlation between external interruptions and broken Pomodoros. This week was a bad one for external interruptions – mostly calls from higher ups wanting to know the status of things that I was working on.

I’m also going to do a little time-comparison here, so I’m including two graphs showing the past two weeks together for each graph to better see how things compare.

Combined Scheduled and Unscheduled Pomodoros with Completed Tasks

Combined Pomodoros Internal and External Interruptions

Now, here’s a recap of last week’s goals and how I’m doing on them:

• Integration with OmniFocus. I think I’ve worked out a good way of using this with OmniFocus which I’ll detail shortly.
• Improve my average daily Pomodoro count. This one actually went down a little bit from 7.29 to 6.86. So, I’ve stayed roughly the same (at 7 Pomodoros/day). I have improved on handling interruptions (despite the increase in “broken” Pomodoros), but this one still needs some work.
• Decrease my interruption rate. I am definitely improving on my internal interruptions, and I’ll try to keep my external interruptions to only the most urgent.

For next week I want to accomplish the following:

• Improve my average daily Pomodoro count. I’d like to increase my average completed Pomodoros to 8 for next week, so I have some work to do to make sure that happens.
• Finish integrating Pomodoro with my task system. One thing I’m still not happy about is the extra paper for the daily To do list, but I still need something to help me track my completed Pomodoros. What I think I’m going to try is to use my little LiveScribe flip notepad to keep track of this. This gives me two benefits: first, it’s contained in one notebook; second, I can digitize and keep my notes forever.
• Finish cleaning up OmniFocus. I still have some stuff floating around in OmniFocus that’s duplicated, but I know have two primary lists: Backlog (taken from AutoFocus) and To Do Today. Other things are ideas that I want to work on, so they’re broken out by project and I move them off of there when I’m ready to work on them.

I mentioned I was going to talk about how I’m using OmniFocus with Pomodoro, didn’t I? The basis for this integration is right above. I have one project called AutoFocus, which I’m going to keep. In there I have three other projects called For Review, Backlog, and To Do Today. The For Review project has items that have become stale and I need to review. This is an artifact of AutoFocus and I will be cleaning this as I go through all of my tasks.

Here’s my daily routine:

1. Do one Pomodoro on my Morning Pages. I write on stuff that happened the previous day, things that I want to mull over on paper, things that I want to accomplish that week/weekend or things I want to do that day.
2. Break out a fresh To Do Today page and Yesterday’s To Do page. I then look over any planned or unplanned Pomodoros that didn’t get finished the previous day to see if they need to be moved over to today’s list, moving them either to Backlog or To Do Today. As I do this, I make sure to estimate the number of Pomodoros it will take to complete each task. If I’ve already done some work on one of these tasks, I make sure to note it in the side margins.
3. Look over my Backlog. I check to see if there are items I want to get done today and move those to To Do Today, making sure they have estimates attached to them.
4. Review my Backlog. I review it again to make sure there isn’t anything I’m missing. If I wrote anything in my Morning Pages, I make sure to note in either Backlog or To Do Today with a time estimate.
5. Errands. I put these after regular tasks that I can time-box. I don’t give these estimates, as they won’t be counted in my Pomodoro count. If there’s a better way, someone tell me in the comments below!
6. Sync with OmniFocus. The last step I take is to synchronize my OmniFocus file so that any tasks I finished are marked off and any new ones are entered. Then I sync OmniFocus on my iPhone so that that’s ready as well.

That’s about it. Would love to hear others’ thoughts on Pomodoro in the comments below!

I promised I’d update everyone with my progress using the Pomodoro Technique, so here it is. This reporting covers the period from last Friday, Oct. 23rd, to Thursday, Oct. 29th. It’s hard for me to see any patterns yet as it’s only been a week, but I’m posting up my two graphs for analysis.

Scheduled and Unscheduled Pomodoros with Completed Tasks

The first graph is comprised of my scheduled, unscheduled, completed Pomodoros, and completed tasks (tasks that I finished with a set of Pomodoros). You can see here on days 3 and 4 I got a little overambitious with how many Pomodoros I would complete, but you can also see on those days my completed Pomodoros went way up as well. Not sure if there is a correlation there yet or not.

Pomodoros Internal and External Interruptions

The next graph is my tracking of internal and external interruptions. As you can see, I’m still working on controlling my interruptions during a given Pomodoro.

Now, this week was a bit of an oddity because most of my co-workers were out sick at one point or another during the week, so I was able to concentrate (when at work) a lot better. Next week will be the real challenge, but I do feel better having gotten into the groove of it, so maybe next week will be ok.

There are some items that I’m tracking that I’m not sure what to do with yet:

• Estimate vs. Actual Pomodoros per task – I have several tasks that I’ve completed and marked how many Pomodoros it actually took me to complete. Not sure if I should be putting this into a spreadsheet and if so, how should I track it?
• Combined tasks – I mark tasks that I’ve combined into one Pomodoro, but again I’m not sure if I should do anything with it.

My goals for next week are:

• Start figuring out how to integrate this technique with OmniFocus and some general task management. This is going to have to happen soon, as I have too many papers floating around right now. But I need to figure out how I’m going to track interruptions, scheduled, unscheduled and completed Pomodoros, etc.
• Improve my average daily Pomodoro count. The max I can do in any one day is 20 (during the week), and probably closer to 24 – 26 for a weekend (if all I did was work, which I won’t do). My max count for the highest day was 13 completed Pomodoros. My average Pomodoro count for the week came to 7.29 or roughly 7 completed Pomodoros a day (3 1/2 hours of sit-down, concentrated work). I’d like to see if I can get that average up to about 10 Pomodoros a day for the week.
• Improve my interruption rate. I can easily control my internal interruptions I just need to get a handle on it and write down all the little things I want to work on so that I don’t distract myself during the current Pomodoro. External interruptions I am still working on handling. We’ll see how next week goes.

A few final notes on integrating the Pomodoro Technique with my life (and other task management):

When I’m working on code stuff, I eventually do get to the point of attempting to build it on our build server. This can easily take more time than the length of one Pomodoro. But I hate to break the groove and go work on something else that will take more than one Pomodoro. And of course if the build fails, I need to figure out what caused the breakage, fix it and attempt to build again (another delay). One thought I had for taking up the rest of the remaining Pomodoro was a quick code review, but I’m not sure how far I should carry that. Or should I keep a list of quick tasks (that I can complete in one to two Pomodoros) that aren’t time-sensitive I could do while code is building and I’m waiting?

Second, how do you handle tracking things like errands using the Pomodoro Technique? Or do you? I’m thinking that Pomodoros are best when you need to either sit down and do something at your desk or at home (like cleaning, organizing, etc.) and not for running errands or shopping. It feels like a system for managing a set amount of time working on something within another system, perhaps.

Again, if you’ve tried Pomodoro in the past, I’d love to hear your impressions on it in the comments below! Especially if you’re a programmer – I’m very curious to see how other programmers have used this system.

I decided to try out the Pomodoro Technique after hearing various people mention it (can’t remember who first mentioned it – maybe Peldi from Balsamiq?) and I just recently saw the book announced on Pragmatic Programmers. Last Thursday I finally sat down and read the free PDF book on the Web site (good introduction and gave me all the tools I needed).

Why am I trying out the Pomodoro Technique? (And other GTD techniques I’ve tried)

Before I dive into the how, I want to dive into the why of trying this technique out. I’ve struggled with time management for years; I’ve tried a variety of techniques, including:

• Getting Things Done (GTD)
• Autofocus – all of its current incarnations
• Treadmill Journaling
• Scheduled/Planned Procrastination (I found a lot on this, but not the original comment I found somewhere)

With GTD I had all the folders laid out, I created my giant list. In fact I did this several times in order to try and truly “do” the system. But even all the gadgets, software programs, etc. couldn’t make me want to do the system. It was too much for me, it really was. The system got weedy and I stopped using it.

Then along came the Scheduled Procrastination, where you work on something for 15-20 minutes, take a break for 5 minutes and then do another stretch. This is similar to the Pomodoro Technique, but instead of stopping at 25 minutes if you feel the desire to keep working you keep working. What happens is that after doing a few 15 minute stints you get on a roll with what you’re doing and you don’t want to stop.

Then came the Autofocus system. I’ve been through all the various iterations of the system. With each iteration I was like, “Oh this will work much better than the last one!” (My wife got tired of hearing that one I’m sure.) I used this in conjunction with the Scheduled Procrastination at work (along with a variation of Treadmill Journaling to track my progress on tasks). But old items I didn’t want to touch got shuffled around and still ended up on the back-burner for so long they got neglected.

What are some of the reasons why I am trying to improve my time management skills in the first place? The truth of the matter is I’m a huge procrastinator. There, I admitted it to whole blogosphere. Unfortunately, I don’t feel any better about it. Another reason is to actually finish some of my personal projects. There are a ton of these that I’ve left in my wake that I started and never went back to because they got hard or there was something shinier elsewhere. Both of these aren’t good qualities to have as a software developer, or as a potential startup partner. So, ultimately, I want to get better.

Why will this be any different?

Now, here I am with the Pomodoro Technique. Why do I think this time will be any different? This time I’m going to make a concerted effort to try this. From what I’ve heard it takes at least 30 days to instill a new habit, so I’m starting with the goal of doing this for a full 30 days. Second, and most importantly, I’ve laid out some very specific goals and will be tracking the progress of those goals throughout this experiment.

1. Better management of my time while at work
2. Be more productive at work
3. Minimize distractions at work
   • E-mail
   • Interruptions from co-workers
   • Instant Messages
4. Managing my non-work, non-free time
   • Homework
   • Open Source projects I’m working on/participating in
   • Business ideas/work
5. Unstructured Time – making sure that I have enough unstructured, free time to recharge my mental batteries

What attracts me to the Pomodoro Technique? There are several things I like:

1. Structured and Un-structured time – this concept really appeals to me
2. Focus on one thing until it’s done – Autofocus kept me hopping from one little task after another until they were magically done. The procrastinator in me liked this, but it didn’t work for me at all – stuff never got “finished”.
3. The Pomodoro (time-unit of 25 minutes) cannot be broken – I like this a lot. It really forces you to sit down and focus on one thing (or 2 or 3 little things) to bang them out. So far I feel really accomplished with this.
4. Mini-breaks, followed by a longer break after 4 Pomodoros – this gives me the opportunity to catch up with Twitter, E-mail, IMs, etc. and gives me a nice mental break from the task at hand. This goes hand-in-hand with what I’ve been reading and following (roughly) for a while now. Helps me to recharge a little in-between things, but keeps me on track with finishing stuff.

My implementation of the system

I’ve chosen to implement this using some minor modifications:

• Digital Timer (instead of the ticking analog timer) – For a couple of reasons:
  • It’s a visual reminder of the time I have left.
  • I wouldn’t be able to hear the ticking anyway since I work with headphones on most of the time.
  • It’s a visual and aural reminder to my co-workers that I’m “on a Pomodoro” so please don’t bother me unless it’s urgent. Admittedly, this will take some work, as everyone feels free to interrupt at any time in my workplace (including myself). I’ll be explaining this to them tomorrow when I setup everything.
  • It has a dual-timer function on it so I can set one for my break as well as my Pomodoro.
• For now I’m using the paper templates provided on the site. As I get more used to the system, I’ll be reincorporating it into OmniFocus in some fashion. I’ll detail what I come up with when I do it.
• Excel spreadsheet for tracking progress with specific tasks and Pomodoro compliance.

Being accountable

Over the next few weeks I’ll be putting up a weekly recap on this (going to shoot for Sundays to keep this to a schedule). I’ll post up some of my Pomodoro pages and some of my tracking results as well to keep myself honest and let others see how they can work with the system. If you haven’t already, download the book (or buy the Pragmatic Programmer book – “Pomodoro Technique Illustrated“), get a timer (I personally like the idea of something physical I have to work with, but there are several apps/widgets that will do this for you too) and get back to work!

If you’ve tried Pomodoro in the past, I’d love to hear your impressions on it in the comments below!