eNOugh TIME in the day..
Time is never enough, right?
We rush all the day but quite often we feel like we haven't done enough.
Always caught on (too) many activities and - who knows why - our list of outstanding things still grows up.
Have you ever noticed - at the end of a day - that is even hard to remember or describe what you have done along the day?
How often do we get interrupted - or distracted - and can't focus on important tasks?
Some 10 years ago - thanks to my colleague Henrik - I discovered Pomodoro Technique and gave it a try.
At the very beginning I found really hard to complete one single Pomodoro.
My scores were poor, I just collected many Interruptions marks on my ToDo list.
Pomodoros were very few, sometimes neither one.
Day by day I diligently tracked on a separate chart both Internal and External Interruptions collected from my ToDo lists - now you don't need to do this manually any more
see how
Most of all I was using this technique to monitor and analyze the reasons of my poor productivity.
Quite soon I noticed a couple of interesting things:
- the number of interruptions was really high.
- the root cause of my interruptions was.. myself.
The huge number of Internal Interruptions - eg those Interruptions caused by myself - really surprised me.
All those bad habits like having a quick look at the mail, procrastinating, made me continuously interrupt and switch to other tasks.
I had found out - and sort of measured - the root cause of my poor productivity.
In the meantime my completed Pomodoros were still a few, I was not seeing any benefit for my productivity and that was not encouraging - but I didn't give up.
I saw this technique was quantifying the impact of interruptions so my goal became to reduce the number of interruptions at least.
After a couple of weeks the number of Interruptions did go down and slowly - very slowly - my completed Pomodoros started to increase.
At the 4th, 5th week I experienced some improvement in the tasks I could finish up - and the number of completed pomodoros was around 3 or 4 per day.
While I was learning a new skill to manage interruptions, I became also aware of a different feel about time.
Time was no more something that just 'flies away'. It became a sort of ally, a resource that helps me realize my goals.
That awareness had a great calming effect on me, a good side-effect to escape that hustle and bustle I experience every day.
Pomodoro Technique revealed an anti-stress benefit and thanks to its simplicity I went on practising.
I googled around for Windows timers but I decided I'd better to make a Windows pomodoro app on my own, with customizable options - especially to disable the ticking sound of the timer when I was in the office! I came out with a first app called 'TomaTime' which name was then changed to 'PomoTime' and later became 'XorTime'.
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