Week 3 — A magic formula to get you through the day

Now the mathematicians amongst you will soon spot that, despite my impressive use of brackets, I am no Good Will Hunting. Nevertheless, I believe I have created the perfect equation for this week’s habit.

PT+FL15=rt[S(uccess)+H(appiness)]!

Here is a corresponding collage for those who are more visually inclined. (I’ve been a bit obsessed about collages over the last week. More on that later.)

Let’s break it down.

PT — Pomodoro Technique. You may have heard of it. The idea that you work for short, focused, periods of time (traditionally 25 minutes) before taking a short break, thus getting lots more done than you would have, because it’s not actually possible to work to your full capacity for very long before you get edgy, irritable, very vulnerable to the Facebook Vortex and possibly bedsores.

FL15 — FlyLady’s ‘You can do anything for 15 minutes’. What can I say about the FlyLady? She has changed so many people’s lives, 15 minutes at a time. If you can handle taking inspiration from a middle-aged woman with purple wings then she will change yours too. She also makes a timer. I have the old model, the new model has an extra button and a ‘vibrate’ option, but I think mine is more stylish.

rt — ‘road to’ because as we all know it’s all about the journey and not the destination. It is in lower case because otherwise it would be RT which stands for ‘Russia Today’ a television station funded by the Russian government and that’s not really the model I’m going for.

[S(uccess)+H(appiness)] — Success and Happiness. Self-explanatory.

! — The exclamation mark is just for emphasis.

But what does it all mean?

It means that while I have been enjoying all that white space on my Grand Master List of Daily Routines (GMLODR), it is time to fill it in a bit.

To refresh your memory, my GMLODR currently looks like this…

But now using my magic formula I’m going to flesh it out a bit. Here’s how it works.

Every hour that you want to be productive is to be broken down into two parts:

a) A focused time block of 45 minutes (I like to call these my ‘pomodorinos’, or if you want to be properly Italian about it, ‘pomodorini’). These are your cherry tomatoes. A 25 minute cherry tomato is too short for me, I like fat and juicy cherry tomatoes, ones that are about 45 minutes. And besides, that leaves 15 minutes left of the hour which is very handy for part b). Set a timer on your computer dashboard (or PC equivalent) for 45 minutes and get on with whatever pomodorino you have set yourself. Once that timer goes off it’s time for…
UPDATE: In this Medium post Mitchell Lee talks about using Slack as your Pomodoro timer. Great idea for those of you who do a lot of Slacking throughout their day!

b) 15 minutes of something that forces you to GET OFF THE COUCH or desk, or hammock, or wherever it is you like to work. (I am a great believer in Winston Churchill’s habit of working in bed myself) This is where you need to move. Now. I know you don’t want to, trust me I know. You are right in the middle of something really interesting and if you could just keep going for another three hours you’d have that collage finished for sure. I don’t care. MOVE! “But what should I do?” you say. There are SO many things you could choose from. You could do a bit of stretching. You could make your bed. You could wash the dishes. You could put your laundry in the dryer (if you are American), hang it outside (if you are Australian) or drape it artfully over all the radiators in the house (if you are English). You could dance the Charleston. Over time we will discuss great uses of FL15s, but for now, just embrace the concept, and MOVE!

So, with this in mind, I have added some pomodorini to MY Grand Master List of Daily Routines. It now looks like this…

See that — five big fat cherry tomatoes to get through each weekday, with accompanying FL15s. Eeeek — that’s a big commitment after the last couple of weeks of flitting about. I am going to have to be resolute!

Why do some items have an asterisk?
If an item has an asterisk, that means it has to be done every day, no matter what. Unless I am on holiday in an exotic location, in which case I would probably still try to do it, but will forgive myself if I don’t, as a special treat, because holidays are ALL about special treats (especially Baileys Irish Cream, or whatever cheap alternative they give you at all-inclusive resorts).

If it does not have an asterisk, then it only has to be done on home working week days. If I am on the road, or giving myself a day off to go sight-seeing, or sitting in someone else’s office for most of the day helping THEIR business grow (which is going to happen at least some of the time because my cherry tomatoes will not be contributing very much to my bank balance to begin with) then these can be dropped. I’m not a complete slave driver! Also — a daily basket is only 24 hours big and even though we’ve already established my maths is a bit rubbish I do know that if you have a basket full of the bread of a day job, you can’t fit too many cherry tomatoes in at the same time.

Why so much Color Shopper?
I spent quite a lot of last week doing my Color Shopper plan of attack — i.e. how I’m going to turn this fledgling business of mine into a global monopoly. Obviously, this is going to require AT LEAST four cherry tomatoes a day to get there. The initial focus is on getting people to come to Color Shopper (traffic) and for them to buy something (revenue — yay!). To do this, I need to be able to have some content to promote and some products to sell. Hence the focus on blog posts (with collages) and product adding each day. Color Shopper really is my big thing at the moment, and it is not going to happen if I don’t show up to the workstation!

If your Peace Mission is so important, why aren’t you doing it first? 
Firstly, because my creativity diminishes as the day goes on, and currently the most creative pomodorino I have is blog writing (and collage making), so it’s best if I get on with that early. Secondly, other than my Peace Mission, blog writing is the most important of all my cherry tomatoes (as is evidenced by the asterisk on one of the sessions) And thirdly, quite often a Peace Mission involves phone calls to other people, and most people I know would prefer not to be called before 9.00am. I know, I don’t understand it either.

What about the gaps in your timings?
Gaps are good if you can manage them. You have other stuff to do, like eat breakfast, play with the cat and check Facebook. One cannot live on cherry tomatoes alone. I’d love to keep lots of gaps as we carry on, but I will no doubt start filling them all up, because I’m like that. Best to enjoy them while you can.

I find the real advantage of PT+FL15=rt[S(uccess)+H(appiness)]! is that you don’t have to choose between doing your projects and doing the household chores. I’m speaking here to those people who generally manage to avoid one by doing the other, whichever way round it is for you. By the end of THIS day, you will magically have done a bit of both. As your home tidies itself during your FL15s, so will your brain, and the Total Chaos will begin to recede, and you will feel even more at peace with the world.

Perhaps your other half will be so impressed they will be whip you off to an exotic, Baileys-laden holiday in appreciation.

Now — go set your pomodorini for this week; at least two of them, even if you have a proper job. Aim for one of them to be your Peace Mission. The other one should be something you really care about, your project du jour. If you work from home, you should have more of course, because you actually have lots of room in that basket for your tomatoes.

Then decide which bits of the GMLODR deserve an asterisk.

Then be resolute.

Troubleshooting

• Unable to convince yourself to stop working on your cherry tomato when your 45 minutes is up? Try imagining all your blood coagulating somewhere near your bottom, and your body fluids gradually turning to molasses. That usually works for me.
• Still can’t manage it? Drink lots of water. You will soon naturally be needing to get up at least once an hour!
• Didn’t manage to start your pomodorino at the time you said you would? It SO doesn’t matter, don’t use it as an excuse not to do it at all. It’s all a guide. You are probably going to have to move those cherry tomatoes around quite regularly as a few last minute bargains find their way into the basket. You might even need to move some to the weekend. That’s allowed. Just do them SOMETIME so you get to tick off your checkboxes, which as we all know is one of the great joys in life. In contrast, unticked checkboxes at the end of the day are a truly forlorn sight.
• Don’t have a timer? You need to get one. And you have to be able to carry it around with you from room to room. Buy one from the FlyLady. Use your phone. DON’T just watch the clock, it’s not the same.

In other news — some good things that happened last week…

• I got two different types of journalism related freelance work booked for April. The work came to me, I didn’t go looking. I love this. Long may it continue.
• My sister came over for another brief visit to drink bubbly and gin with me. (She’s enjoying this whole living in Spain rather than Australia thing and is making full use of European budget airline travel). We didn’t have a lot of time so we combined our two regulation drinks into one by discovering the French 75. It wasn’t brilliant. I don’t know if that’s because it’s not to our taste, or it just wasn’t well made. We’ll have to try again somewhere else.
• I got some decent money back from the tax department. Result!
• Went for a two hour walk in the fabulous woodlands of Wimbledon Common (one of those London places I’ve never got round to visiting despite living here for more than a decade AND growing up with a Wombles pillow case) with a fellow start-upperer. Thank you Chris.
• We hosted a weekend in-law clan gathering at our place — love having the place filled with people and grateful that our one bedroom flat is now so cleverly designed we can actually sleep 8!
• Attended a free workshop at Google UK about some pretty cool Google tools I didn’t know existed. My first visit to a fancy Google building with all its accompanying Google quirks.
• Managed to create a PicMonkey collage I am not ashamed of. I can’t tell you how much this has been holding me back. Collages are essential to my Color Shopper promotion efforts, and I have been spending far too long trying to decide which tool to use and how to use it. (Just one small technical problem had been causing me a week’s worth of grief, but it now appears to be resolved). It’s very basic and I know I probably ended up breaking lots of design rules, but it’s a start. Please feel free to have a look and admire it profusely (NB: the accompanying blog post has NOT been written yet. Expect better news on this next week!)
• A spontaneous visit to my local-aristocratic-house-turned-public-park resulted in an evening spent at a Magical Lantern Festival to celebrate the Lunar New Year. Stunning, despite the rain.

And here’s last week’s DONE list

Because DONE lists should always be celebrated…

If you have a DONE list of your own to show off, feel free to take a screen grab and share it below. I’d love to see it.

See you next week, it’s going to be a busy one…

Suzi

FOR HANDY REFERENCE: 2016 habits glued to the Jenga Tower so far…
The post that started it all — For the first time that I can remember, I’m not waiting for something…
Week 1 — Get up early, ignore social media/email/news-infused mobile phone with special dopamine enhancing features and head straight to old-fashioned pen and paper for writing of Daily Intentions and identification of day’s Peace Mission
Week 2 — The keeping of the ‘Done List’ predominantly made up of achieved Peace Missions.

(Thinking you’d like to hop aboard this slow-moving ‘make the most of your day/productivity/I have to justify giving up my job’ train? Just click the ‘Follow’ button and we’ll do it together.)