- Have a list of things to do.
- Pick one thing to work on. Start clock.
- When tired, stop clock. Take a break.
It worked because of two reasons:
- Observing yourself led to the Hawthorne Effect
- Time spent per day was a quantifiable measure of productivity.
Simple.
It worked quite well for more than six months, but it just fizzled out for me. I couldn’t explain why at that time.
In retrospect, I think it was because of a few problems:
- It did not solve procrastination. When I knew it was a big task, I would just delay getting started because I had put pressure on myself to not pause the clock early once it was started.
- It did not help me stay focused for long. I would lose enthusiasm every few days because I would feel drained.
- It was easy to lose track that I was doing time tracking! For example, I would be focusing on an action item, and when something urgent came up, I would just switch to that and would have forgotten about the running clock.
- After a few months, it was not satisfactory enough to just look at a number at the end of the day and say “I’ve been productive today.” It just wasn’t doing the trick any more.
- If a task was big and could not get completed that day, I would often feel demotivated and frustrated rather than happy about having put effort on the task.
Many people had commented on that article suggesting that I try out the Pomodoro technique. After six months, I did visit that website, but reading “Work in units of 25 minutes, with 5 minutes break in-between” did not stir up my enthusiasm. Same goes for reading the official book.
Then I happened to notice on the Pragmatic Programmers website that they had a book out on the same topic called “Pomodoro Technique Illustrated” by Staffan Nöteberg.
https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/pomodoro-technique-illustrated/9781680500103/
I have a high degree of trust in the quality of the PragProg books, so I blindly bought the ebook, downloaded and read it. It turned out to be one of the best books I have ever read.