How I get my workday done in 3 or 4 hours everyday
I have been working remotely for two years and I struggled setting my own schedule. Sometimes I ended my day feeling unproductive or wondering how I was spending my time without being aware of what I accomplished.
One solution to my problem is the Pomodoro technique, which is a method to break down work into intervals of 25 minutes. This technique is helpful to procrastinate in an intelligent way; you can concentrate for an interval of time and then have a break for a shorter time, but what isn’t clear is: How many intervals (Pomodoros) do you need to do in order to finish your workday?
A study (that helped me to figure out that question) reveals that the average worker is only productive for 2 hours and 53 minutes per day, the remaining time is spent in activities unrelated to work (checking social media, reading news, discussing out of work activities with colleagues, etc.).
Taking the 2 hours and 53 minutes as base, that gives us approximately 7 intervals of 25 minutes, although in practice I’m doing 8 to 10 intervals. This could vary per person and the type of work, but at least we could consider 7 as the minimum. Also I found out that writing down consciously what I’m going to do in my next interval helps me to create peace of mind about my productive time, because at the end of each day I finish with a task history that justifies my work.
After a few months using a spreadsheet and a Pomodoro timer I was looking for a solution to integrate these tools seamlessly, Despite trying different and complex Pomodoro apps I decided to create a simple and minimalistic solution named Work & Flow:
Basically what I wanted was a tool that allows me to create tasks per day and with only one input field to add a brief description. In addition, I wanted to show how much time has passed since a task has been completed (helpful to manage procrastination).
If you’re interested in giving it a try you can access to https://worknflow.com, it’s completely free and I will be adding more features in the next months.
I hope you find it useful too, in any case I’d love to hear your feedback, and answer any questions you may have.
Thanks!
