Shaping Experience

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.

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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.

pomodoro_daily_chart

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 Pomodoro Daily Chart 2013-05-29