A nice visual way to represent and work through a batch of 'work'

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#1

Today I have been tinkering with a new way of representing batches of daily work which I find quite appealing / motivating as it provides a nice visual representation of progress.

Firstly, this relies on ‘time boxing’ (for me, specifically the pomodoro method) but could be adapted.

So imagine we have decided that we have a report to write and expect it to take 3 hours we might set up a bullet point like this:

So we have a dynalist time stamp to show when you start the batch of work - the tomatoes indicate ‘pomodoros’ (so for me, 25 minute blocks of time with 5 minute breaks in between) - the {} brackets indicate the fact that 6 pomodoros was my estimate for how long this would take - if I have to add more pomodoros afterwards they would go outside these brackets to show that it took longer than I expected.

In the note section I have a tag for the project I’m working on and I might add notes here if appropriate …

So as I move through this batch of work, I use squared brackets [:tomato:] to indicate the pomodoro (the tomato is a unicode symbol) I’m working on now and strikethrough :tomato: to indicate a pomodoro that has been done …

I of course have turned completion and moving on to the next pomodoro into a macro (phrase express code below):
{#CTRL -chars x}{#BKSP}{#DEL}{#CTRL -chars v}[{#RIGHT}]

So part way through the batch it might look like this:

I think there’s a LOT more that could be done with this - at a minimum, you could introduce visual rewards like this where you get a treat after 3 pomodoros:

Some day (either through the main app, piotr’s powerbank, maybe rawbytz will make something or some other third party genius etc :slight_smile: ) I think we will be able to ‘count’ the number of pomodoros we have spent on certain things easily …

Anyway, please do reply to this if you have any ideas how to improve the approach - I’ve only just started playing around with it and am sure there is more potential in there.

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#2

you could probably do something like this instead

use a phrase express macro to initialize your pomodoro unicode symbols

@30 → creates 1 :tomato:
@60 or @1h → creates 2 :tomato::tomato:
@90 or @1.5h → create 3 :tomato::tomato::tomato:

so you don’t have to figure out how many pomodoros but rather how long you think it’d take

then you can use your macro {#CTRL -chars x}{#BKSP}{#DEL}~~{#CTRL -chars v}~~[{#RIGHT}]

you still would probably have to do your progress checkmark manually though.

Counting :tomato: shouldn’t be too hard considering how complex piotrs scripts are

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#3

very complex.
I think if you do all of this you would end up using 1 or 2 pomodoros more just for outlining pomodoros

#4

Uhh it takes seconds

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#5

Very nice Pomodoro setup. Using Pomodairo but I’m keeping this in mind. Thanks for sharing!

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#6

It seemed a bit to learn, I copied the unicode and am doing it manually tho.

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#7

progress is ultimately reflected in the effects/outcome/results

there’s an abundance of evidence for the negatives of gamification as well known across the web

if any given goal matters, a person would already be inspired, motivated

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