Several times I’ve tried to get along with the famous Pomodoro Technique but to no avail. Every attempt crashed into the ugly truth that so many of my tasks don’t break up nicely into 30-minute intervals. So I tinkered a little bit with this and that and here is what I’ve come up with, a time management system of my own. Everybody should make one at some point in their lives, right?
[NAME’S NOT ASSIGNED]
My system is in its early days… or rather weeks, because a week is the least meaningful amount of time there. And one week fits into an A5 sheet of checked paper:
Let’s go briefly over what’s in this photo.
The basic block is a 15-minute cell which corresponds to exactly one cell in the sheet. It simply means that you dedicate 15 minutes of your time to uninterrupted work. The trick here is that you don’t need to take on only one such block at a time. You can go with 30 or 45 minutes which will be represented by 2 or 3 cells respectively.
The 3- and 6-celled blocks you can see in the photo are for visual convenience only but their placement is not. I have six days in my (self-assigned) working week so there are six rows for that. Though if you want to schedule all days in your week, there’s enough space if you’re careful with the column names. Which, in turn, denote how I apportion time between the activities I indulge in.
The timestamps on the left tell at what time I did my exercising. That’s by far the least useful information in this whole chart — I’ll probably get rid of it soon.
Dots and As in the Architect of Thought column mark the days when meditation and Anki sessions occurred. On the right are the total numbers of 15-minute cells over one day, I use them to calculate weekly and monthly averages of productive time.
Finally, the barely visible line across Saturday’s row (the last one) is the laziness line. On the days when I don’t feel energetic or organized enough, I cross out half a day or a whole one and don’t account for it in the average productive time calculation.
Results
I’ve been using this for 14 weeks and my effective time has increased from 3 hours and 45 minutes at the start to approximately 5 hours now. I’m not sure whether it has been due to the systematic approach only, because a seasonal change may have been at play. But I certainly feel more confident around scheduling now that I have a visual chart of what I plan to spend my time on during a week.
Variability
The thing I like the most about this is that almost all parts of the system are not in any way constrained. It’s possible to play around with everything!
You can vary your plan for each new week. It is very adaptive to the changes in your monthly goals and beyond.
No elements except for a basic 15-minutes cell are necessary. You can add and remove any of the structural patterns I’ve described above.
Even days and activity columns are optional: simply draw a unified blob of 100 cells representing the amount of work you want to do in a week.
It’s easy to add a specific recurrent task that you need. Like meditation or Anki sessions in my table, you just have to invent a symbol for yours.
I’d love to enrich my own experience with this system so, if you have any ideas, I will appreciate if you share them in the comments!
Afterword
On average, I still use the 30-minute blocks most of the time. Those work well for 80% of job tasks and most learning ones. But I like to watch lectures in one sitting and to do exercises for a short time a couple of times throughout the day — for this, the finer granularity helps and makes this framework much more responsive than Pomodoro.
Do you have your own system? Or do you know a popular one that could be a good inspiration for improvements in this one? Please share!
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