Breaks

It is important to take breaks when doing the Pomodoro technique. Working takes away out mental energy and it is important to replenish it. The author of the Pomodoro Technique Illustrated makes four Pomodori a set and a set break is about 15 - 30 mins. Even thoug the length of a Pomodoro and the break can be varied. The original technique advocates a 25-minute slot of focused work followed by a 5-minute break.

Planning

Planning is an important step to get things done. By writing down your plans for a day, it helps you to get focused. The Pomodoro technique requires a planning stage every morning. During the planning stage, you choose the highest priority activities from your Activity Inventory sheet and put them into your To Do Today sheet.

In the Activity Inventory sheet, you don't write what to do, but write down how things will be when they are done. For example:

1. Living room tidy
2. Cookbook ordered

So these reminds you about the end results you want to achieve.

Daily plans can help with setting more refined goals whereas I think having weekly and monthly plans allows you to set larger goals.

Reference:
Pomodoro Technique Illustrated http://pragprog.com/book/snfocus/pomodoro-technique-illustrated

Perfectionism Prevents Action

This line caught my eye when I was reading the book Promodoro Technique Illustrated.

Perfectionism prevents action. Waiting until you have devised the perfect solution to something is merely a form of procrastination. Procrastination is not an option in the Pomodoro Technique. You just go ahead and get started on a Pomodoro, and you don’t have to worry about being “totally perfect.” Winding up the clock and putting in 25 minutes of effort will reward you with being able to write an X and then take a break.

I feel that this has been plaguing me in terms of coding, and maybe other things. Before I start writing code, I spent a lot of time thinking about what is the best way of the doing that, what kind of design patterns I should use, what is the most efficient way etc. I think this is not entirely bad, but I should also limit the time spending on those kind of thinking. Sometimes I feel really torn between certain design choices and couldn't make up my mind. I think during these situations, I should just pick one action and proceed. Some of the indecisiveness may be due to my inexperience. By picking a course of action and moving on, I will later discover whether this choice is good or not. Even though I may redo certain things, along the way I'm also learning and gaining experience. After all, this may just take the same amount of time as pure thinking and speculating.

Pomodoro Mechanics: Stages

According to the book Pomodoro Technique Illustrated by Staffan Nöteberg, there are five stages in a day with the Pomodoro Technique:

• Planning: Start the day by extracting the most important activities from the Activity Inventory, and writing them in a list on your To Do Today Sheet. This is your Commitment for the day.
• Tracking: Once you've decided on the activities for the day, start your Pomodoro, and collect a small amount of process metrics, for example, count the number of times that you get interrupted.
• Recording: At the end of the day, file your daily observations on the Records sheet. If you tracked the number of interruptions, this number is saved here.
• Processing: After recording, convert the raw data into information. For example, you might calculate how many interruptions you get in an average 25-minute time quantum.
• Visualizing: Finally, you organize the information in a way that helps you see how to improve your process. This is basically a daily retrospective and when you acclimatize your working habits to your reality. 

Currently, PwnTime doesn't have Activity Inventory functionality. I'm still exploring the necessity of doing this. What I do is simply writing down the tasks and the number of estimated Pomodoros. If I don't finish the task, it will remain in the list. The Android app I use has this functionality, and I find it tedious to going back and forth between the Activity Inventory and the To Do Today list. Maybe I'm still not methodical with the technique. Please let me know what your experience is.

I think PwnTime provides an excellent tool for tracking, recording, processing and visualizing. There are still a lot of improvement we need to. Right now we don't have interruption tracking. I'm not sure how important this is yet.