There are two kinds of people in this world; one’s who procrastinate others who only exist in productivity and self help books . For most of my life I have had some good days where every minute is productive may it be work or a hobby and then there are some days where it’s just hard to start and I am constantly switching from one task to another and just wondering what I did all day! Most of us prefer the former kind of the day where we have time to read, write, socialize , get tonnes of work done for the day, exercise and finally close the day by sleeping right on time. It’s that state of ‘Flow‘ where every task for the day will be autotelic in nature and immense joy is derived even from the mundane meetings over video conferences.
I have been trying to find a method on how to get this optimum experience out of my day and get the experience everyday. I have tried the pomodoro technique along with many other time tracking apps which works well for tasks and specially if you are learning something. But in corporate lives there are times when a issue or problem at work will just throw a wrench into everything that you wanted to do that day and you will end up with one, of which you have little memory and have achieved nothing.
Lately, I have been trying a mix of pomodoro method and an excel tracker. I have been getting tremendous benefits from it and I think sharing it with people and getting some feedback might even make it better. Below is the method described in detail:
- Divide your day into 30 minute intervals. Basically, in an excel sheet write down entries for 24 hours of the day broken into 30 minutes interval each
- Once you have all these 48 rows add one more column against it for planned activities. Pomodoro technique asks for a 25 minute time slot but I think for simplicity and to compensate the overhead of switching from one thing to another, a 30 minute window works better. If you are Elon Musk fan and break your day into 5 minute interval, may be you can try that… and let me know how that works for you.
- In the planned activity column be generous and add that hour for exercise, for reading or any other activity that makes the day better for you. Keep time for breakfast, lunch, dinner and when you want to socialize.
- After that all that is needed is to track you daily activities against this planned time. Now there will be things that don’t need 30 mins or will end in between of a time slot. Feel free to enter those in the same cell.
- Now you are all set on your path for being more productive and better time management.
- After a month you will realize few things.
- You are more disciplined. Just by making a plan doesn’t make you one but when you start tracking your day, you will feel there is pressure on you to follow a regimen.
- All of a sudden you have time for working out, reading or whatever you really want to do.
- A well structured day that produces the experience of a Flow which gives you immense satisfaction and pleasure. Even mundane tasks will feel autotelic in nature.
- You will stop doing many things which were really sucking your time and were not giving you any value. You will still watch Netflix but not binge! just that one show…