Reports of productivity techniques working past the honeymoon period are very valuable. Thank you for posting this.
I wonder if the extra energy from the honeymoon-effect could be utilized better to make habits more permanent. Many techniques work just fine but people stop using them for whatever reason.
(Pomodoros have been talked about a bunch on LW. I, like elharo, first started using the technique after attending a CFAR workshop. Cross-posted from my blog.)
The pomodoro technique is, in short, starting a timer and doing 25 minutes of focused work on a single task without interruption, followed by a five minute break. Choose a new task, restart the timer, and repeat.
Throughout 2013 I used pomodoros to execute on pretty much all of my life projects, organized into the following categories:
The Result: 5,008 Pomodoros
The end result was 2,504 hours of recorded work—5,008 pomodoros in total:
Stacked Pomodoros by Week in 2013
A summary, by category (with hours in brackets):
Grand Total: 5,008 (2,504h) – 96.3 (48.2h) avg/week
My version of the pomodoro technique
To be clear, I didn’t use the pomodoro technique 100% faithfully. Certain things here, such as most Health (exercise) stuff, I never actually ran a pomodoro timer. But since I had a system for tracking where and how I spent my time, and since “claiming” all that time helped motivate me e.g. to climb regularly, I included them.
Ways I deviate from the “true” pomodoro technique:
How did I track?
Near the end of 2012 I whipped up a simple web app that I use for tracking all of my pomodoros. Here’s a sample screenshot from a week from earlier this year:
Every pomodoro added is given a description, project, major area, and count. This way I can view all pomodoros by project, area, over a given date range, etc. (I’m pretty sure there are other apps out there that let you do basically the same thing, but I haven’t taken much time to explore them.)
Why I think it’s worked really well for me
Of all the productivity hacks I’ve tried over the last decade, the pomodoro technique was, for me, the hands-down most effective technique. My thoughts on why the pomodoro technique has worked so well for me:
In summary, if you haven’t yet, I highly recommend giving the pomodoro technique a try.