pomodoro
- If I’ve recorded all the commitments I’ve made in a place where I trust myself to remember them later, my mind can let go of worrying about remembering to do them.
- If there are things I haven’t recorded, my mind will get hung up dwelling on them: “don’t forget to buy the widget! Don’t forget to email your boss! Don’t forget to respond to the customer!”
- Find the most important thing to be working on right now.
- Do it.
- Repeat.
- Pick the first thing on my daily plan.
- Work on that thing for 25 minutes uninterrupted. This time is sacred: I don’t do anything else, with the minor exception that if I discover something else I need to do, I’ll pause for a moment to add that thing to my inbox so that I can stop thinking about it and go back to the current task.
- Take a 5 minute break, doing anything but working on the task at hand. Return texts. Check Slack. Browse Hacker News.
- If I’ve finished the task, mark it off and move on to the next one.
- Repeat.
- I never forget the things I’ve promised do to.
- I always know what the most important things are.
- I have a way of getting them done that matches the way my brain works.
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Update: I’ve switched to using Reminders. OmniFocus is amazing but I don’t always need so much organizing power. ↩︎
Integrate Things with Focus
I use the Things task manager to keep track of what I need to do. I use the Focus pomodoro timer to help myself focus on a task that I’m actively working on.
Focus integrates well with another task manager, OmniFocus: you can drag an action from OmniFocus into Focus to create a task to work on, and that task will have a button that links back to the original OmniFocus action. Super convenient! It doesn’t play well with Things, though. If you try the same process, you’ll end up with multiple separate actions for each of the Things to-do’s various properties.
For example, this to-do has the title, note, checklist, tags, when, and deadline options filled in:
Dragging it to Focus creates a whole mess of random tasks:
That’s not helpful. We can do better.
First, I wrote a shortcut using Things’s shiny new Shortcuts actions. For each to-do currently selected in Things, it uses Focus’s URL scheme to create a Focus task with the item’s title, notes, and due date, and a link back to the item in Things.
Second, I made a Keyboard Maestro hot key macro, available only in Things, that executes my shortcut. When I select the to-do item above and press “option-F”, I get one single task with all the details set:
If I click the link icon next to the task’s title, Things opens with that to-do selected.
Ta-da! The workflow is slightly different than with OmniFocus, but only a little bit, and the result is just as useful.
How I get things done
After years — decades — of experimentation, I’ve learned this about myself: when I follow a certain workflow, I’m happy and productive. When I don’t follow it, I’m stressed, anxious, and unproductive. There’s no in-between state. If I want to feel good about all the cool things I’m doing, I have to trust the process and follow it rigorously.
These are the things I use to stay sane and productive.
An inbox
My workflow is inspired by Getting Things Done (aka GTD), but I’m not dogmatic about most of it. The critical part is that I have an “inbox” where I record all of the things I need to do. This isn’t like an email inbox where people send me things they think are important, but the opposite: I decide what’s important enough for me to remember, and those things go into it. I can’t overstate the importance of having this.
Rationale
The GTD book goes into detail about the psychology of it, but the gist is:
It’s the intrusive thought that I’m about to forget something vitally important that creates stress and diverts my attention from what I’d prefer to be thinking about.
Specific recommendations
I’m a huge OmniFocus fan, and I recommend it for everyone serious about organizing their whole life this way.1 Anything is better than not having a system, though. If you have Apple devices, the built-in Reminders app is a great way to get started. It lacks OmniFocus’s powerful features, but has everything needed to get up and running for free. There’s even nothing wrong with a notebook and pen, although that’s a lot less flexible in important ways and those are more things I have to remember to always take with me.
Don’t underestimate the convenience of a voice assistant here. If I’m out running with my wife and suddenly remember something I need to do, I can say “Hey Siri, remind me to …” and trust that it’ll be waiting for me later. Then I can go back to paying attention to how much I hate running.
A daily plan
Every workday, I sit down and sort the things I’ve recorded in my inbox into project areas like “Personal”, “Family”, “Work”, or a few others. Then I decide what I’m going to try go get done that day. I review each of those project areas for urgent things such as paying a bill or preparing for a meeting, and flag those for my “today” list (which is an OmniFocus “perspective” that shows all the things I want to work on right now). Then I choose a few more things I’d like to get done until I feel like I’ve planned a day’s worth of work.
Rationale
Sorry, GTD purists! This is where my process diverges from The GTD Way, which looks closer to:
I’ve tried to follow that flow many times but it doesn’t work for me. I’d rather dedicate time each morning to planning my day than continually revisit my list of possible tasks as I go.
A timer
Deciding what do to is good. Doing it is better. I use the pomodoro technique to make that happen. The short version is:
Rationale
I can’t work on 1 thing for 8 hours straight (unless it’s something that’s letting me procrastinate, in which case I’ll see you tomorrow). I can’t do it. But I can work on anything for 25 minutes, even if it’s not something I enjoy doing. That’s long enough to get an appreciable amount of work done, but short enough that my focus doesn’t drift. It allows me to concentrate intensely on 1 thing at a time without worrying that I’m neglecting important messages from family or coworkers — or worse, getting bored. Because I know that I’ll be able to check my texts a few minutes from now, I’m free to think about my current work.
Specific recommendations
I like Focus by Masterbuilders. It works on all the platforms I use, has nice reports, integrates with OmniFocus, and syncs perfectly. I’ve tried every similar app I can find, but keep returning to Focus.
But any timer can work, from an app on your phone to a physical wind-up time stolen from your kitchen.
Conclusion
Put together, these 3 ingredients give me superpowers:
Without them, I’m a ball of unproductive anxiety. With them, I can do anything. When I find myself feeling swamped by new things to do flying at me faster than I can finish the old ones, my mantra is “rely on the tools”. They always see me through.