Some days I feel flat and completely unproductive. It's a struggle to get anything done. I find that time-boxing helps. Today I found that going for a run really helped. This morning I felt totally discombobulated. This afternoon after the run, I had a lot more focus. I still need to ensure that I get the right things done though.
Making Space in Time
Sometimes I think the best way to get things done is just to allocate space in the day in order to achieve them. For example; I find it hard to write blog posts. Left to my own devices, my blog would resemble a desolate wasteland. But all I need to do is allocate 10 minutes out of my day in order to write something, and I can get something written that I can upload to my blog.
This is the beauty of time-boxing, of the Pomodoro technique: It forces you to allocate a fixed section of time in which to achieve something. If you just make a space in time it's amazing what you can do.
Displaying a Productivity Chart in Emacs
I have created the following bit of Emacs Lisp that generates my daily productivity graph and displays it in it's very own emacs buffer. You can kill the buffer by pressing the 'q' key.
Productivity for 29th May, 2013
I coded up a script to output a chart of what my productivity looks like for the day. It is based on my Pomodoro software that logs all the time-boxes to my calendar on Mac OS/X. My program extracts all the information and constructs a nice looking chart. The idea is that I track what things are making me more productive.
You can find the script over in my GitHub repository
callistevents now on GitHub
I wrote a small command-line program this morning called callistevents (from Calendar List Events). It is a Mac OS/X program that lists all the events in a specific calendar between 2 dates.