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Hah, found it myself - pomodoro was working for me years ago (That's why I implemented http://pomodorro.net). However, pomodoro was somehow not fully natural for me, probably because of being not really task oriented, but somehow artificially time oriented... At some point I realised, the great idea is what I call "do-dids". It's nothing really new, it's just all focus-management ideas in one bucket. So, Do-Did is something simple. Just plan a task, and do it, and then be happy you did it: 1/ Plan a TODO task(s) during some less-focused time: during a shower, a drive, while making a coffee, during boring meeting, your office-kitchen time. Just plan a task in all the possible ways: what to do in optimistic path (when stuff goes as expected), but also in pessimistic way (when you get stuck in a task). 1.2/ A task should be something achievable, actually a micro-task. Don't plan "building a website". Plan "a hello-world server started", then "added .css/.js file handling", then "first content server to browser"... 2/ Prepare environment: that's tricky... Read all the e-mails (and respond), read the news, prepare the hot coffee, go to toilet. Nothing like that is allowed after you start the do-did (of course in common-sense...).
Now, important for me was to have a "focus maintainer" and "world-insulator". Before I used pomodoro, but now I went back to old-school: I play one CD of well-known music. Not really a CD of course (I actually use mp3+winamp == really old-school). 3/ Do: put on your headphones, play the CD and don't stop until the task or CD is finished. It's up to you what to do if you finish the task (you can start next one or take a break) or the CD before the task (you may need a break, but maybe you can just start next CD).
What matters here for me, is that CD time - 60-80 minutes works really good for me. 3.1/ No distractions. No news, no email, no co-workers... Definitely no facebook ! 4/ Did: you did it ! Now do something nice for you (coffee, browse the net, take a walk around, ...)
Tell yourself you did it, think about it for a while (something like scrum's retrospective or sprint's review). The task is done, you can now plan the next stuff - phase #1 again. Do-Dids work great for me. There is plenty of time for everything. I realised that "planning phase" is very good thing, as then the "Do" phase usually goes quite good. Do-dids are actually compact/personal version of scrum sprints for me, just happening in parts-of-day basis, instead of weeks. |