I had heard a while ago that the ideal holiday was one in which you had a fairly bad start to it, but with a peak experience close to the end of the holiday. The rationale is that we tend to base our judgement of the holiday on the range of our trough-to-peak experiences. The larger the spread between the trough and the peak, with the peak occurring towards the end of the experience, the better we perceive the experience to be.
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.
Productivity for 2013-05-30
Not a hugely productive day today, unfortunately. Although since I have been monitoring my productivity hourly, I have been way more productive than normal, which is interesting.
This morning I was planning to write a cron job to save my daily productivity totals to a database, but I realised that I actually have all the information in my Mac OS/X calendar anyway, and can just retrieve the data there.
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.