You can look into the lessons in The Power of Habit and think more about the cues that trigger the habit routine and the rewards that follow it and strengthen the habit.
Pomodoros have the obvious cue of needing to get some work done. I guess the simple feeling of accomplishment from a successful pomodoro could serve as the reward. Maybe more explicit thinking about each could help make the habit stronger.
(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.