How do you not get fatigued with recording things?
I'm actually a bit surprised that I was able to maintain my recording for over a year. Some reasons why I think I was successful in hindsight:
What are your recommendations for amount of structure before you incorporate pomodoros? Is there any structural/organizational stuff you should have set up before you do them?
You need basically zero structure to start using pomodoros; just a task and some time to work on it. (I say this especially because I'm really bad for wanting my system to be "perfect" before I use it.) I treaded the pomodoro waters for several months before delving in to tracking everything. My organization system, in short, is having a +/-5 year plan, a current year plan, and current quarter plan, and current month plan, and then specific tasks/projects for the current week (which I roughly estimate in pomodoros, or at least aim to hit a certain total for the week).
(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.