Mark Needham

Over the last 3/4 months I’ve been playing around with the idea of using pomodoros to track all coding/software related stuff that I do outside of work.

I originally started using this technique while I was doing the programming assignments for ml-class because I wanted to know how much time I was spending on it each week and make sure I didn’t run down rabbit holes too often.

One interesting observation that I noticed from keeping the data of these pomodoros was that while during the early programming assignments it would take me 7 or 8 pomodoros to finish, by the end it was down to around 4.

I think this was due to the difficulty of the assignments decreasing as time went on, I didn’t improve that dramatically!

As I mentioned a few weeks ago I’ve also been using pomodoros in combination with a yak stack to make sure I don’t go off track and it’s been interesting applying the technique while trying to solve a problem I’m having with using the Jersey client on Android.

It’s such a fiddly problem and splitting my time into 25 minute slots has forced me to create a plan for what I’m going to try and do in that pomodoro, whether it be ruling out an approach or trying to understand the underlying code that isn’t working.

I haven’t been successful in solving my problem but I’m pretty sure that I’ve spent much less time trying to solve it than I would have otherwise. I can certainly imagine spending hours aimlessly trying things that have no chance of working.

One thing I’ve been experimenting with is reducing the length of the pomodoro to 15 minutes when I know there’s something specific that I want to investigate and I’m fairly sure it won’t take a full length pomodoro.

Previously I would end up just killing time for 10 minutes or just resetting the pomodoro because I didn’t have anything else to do.

I generally enjoy coding much more by applying this time constraint and I think the reason for that is explained by The Progress Principle, which I’m currently reading:

If people are in an excellent mood at the end of the day, it’s a good bet that they have made some progress in their work. If they are in a terrible mood, it’s a good bet that they have had a setback.

To a great extent, inner work life rises and falls with progress and setbacks in the work. This is the progress principle

Using a pomodoro seems to reduce the amount of time that is spent dealing with setbacks and it creates frequent opportunities to discard an approach you’re taking if it’s clear that it’s not going anywhere.

A disadvantage that I’ve sometimes felt when working on the Jersey/Android problem is that I really don’t want to spend 25 minutes working on it because I’ve been getting absolutely nowhere with it for about 6/7 pomodoros now.

I’d rather delude myself that I’m going to magically fix it just by fiddling around with the code for an indeterminate period of time!

In a way constraining coding in this way does take some of the fun out of it as well because it’s now more structured and you tend to have fun when you’re just randomly doing stuff and lose track of time.

On the other hand I probably end up doing a lot more of the stuff I want to do when I constrain it in this way!

Decisions, decisions…

I learnt about the pomodoro technique a couple of years ago and while I did try it out sporadically back then, it’s only recently that I thought I’d properly give it a try when managing my spare time.

My approach without the pomodoro technique is to have a long list of things that I could do and then not really doing any of them because I feel bad about not doing one of the other things instead.

I therefore decided to give it a try so that I’d actually do something on the weekends and during evenings after work.

The pomodoro technique is defined like so:

1. Choose a task to be accomplished
2. Set the Pomodoro to 25 minutes (the Pomodoro is the timer)
3. Work on the task until the Pomodoro rings, then put a check on your sheet of paper
4. Take a short break (5 minutes is OK)
5. Every 4 Pomodoros take a longer break

I pick the task I’m going to do based on what my motivation is at the time – whatever I feel most motivated by is what I’ll do next.

The most valuable thing for me so far from using this technique is that I’m able to stop myself from getting distracted.

When I don’t have a timer running I end up looking at echofon all the time and then loop between email accounts, Facebook and the BBC sport page even though 99% of the time there’s nothing that I want to read there anyway.

I don’t follow the 5 minute break between pomodoros particularly well – it’s often the case that I’m so pleased that I actually managed to do something in 25 minutes where I’d previously have yak shaved for 3 hours that I don’t feel like having that period of focus so soon!

Using the technique is supposed to also encourage us to delay external distractions as well e.g. if someone wants to talk to us then we should try and put that off until we’re done with the current pomodoro.

Mario Fusco wrote about this 18 months ago or so:

Said that, in my opinion there are also other important drawbacks in the pomodoro technique. What should I reply to my customer who is calling me, possibly from the other side of the ocean? That I am in the middle of my pomodoro and I can’t break it? Oh, please.

If someone talks to me in person while I’m in a pomodoro then I tend to just break it and talk to them because it seems strange not to. What I’m doing generally isn’t that important that I can’t talk to someone instead.

It’s also been useful for helping me to focus on learning one thing at a time.

Without the time constraint I can spend hours going off on various tangents thinking that I’m learning loads of things but in reality not learning all that much.

Now I can start with doing just one thing and if I think of something else that I want to do then I’ll add it to the end of the list if it’s not directly related to what I’m doing right now.

I’ve noticed that I sometimes have a bit of psychological dislike of chunking my time into these slots. Part of me quite likes the chaos of randomly following topics of interest in an unstructured way.

I also haven’t yet decided what I should do with instant messenger conversations that happen while I’m doing a pomodoro.

While writing this post I didn’t respond to any of the people I was chatting to but I enjoy IMing in an unstructured way and wouldn’t necessarily want to limit those conversations to just the breaks in the pomodoros.