A 48 hours 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 time I was curious to understand why I couldn't complete my tasks, why my to do list was full of items hanging there for ever.
And I was so busy that I had no time for anything, no time to carry on and finish my tasks at work, no time for work-out, I really needed 48 hours days.
I wanted to experiment something new
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.
Anyway I adopted Pomodoro Technique pretty quickly, thanks to the simplicity of its (few) rules.
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' an early name that was later changed to 'PomoTime' and then it became 'XorTime'.
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