Productivity Workflow

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I have been lucky to be able to work from home during the coronavirus quarantine, and for the most part, I have been able to keep up with my workload and stay productive. The only problem that I really ran into was staying focused on tasks. My position has changed a bit lately and I am doing more work on the infrastructure side of the business, but I am still doing development work as well. Often I feel like I am just bouncing between projects and not spending enough time on any one thing to get something accomplished. 

I started looking at strategies to improve my productivity and I ran across the Pomodoro technique. I had looked at it before, but I never tried implementing it. The basic idea of this technique is to work in 25-minute blocks of time that are referred to as Pomodoro's. After each Pomodoro, you take a five-minute break, and after four Pomodoro's, you take a twenty-minute break. The technique is actually named after a tomato-shaped kitchen timer. To use the technique you have to have timers going off every 25 minutes and then again after the breaks which is why I never tried it in the office. I figured since I am working alone at the moment, having alarms going off all the time, really isn't a problem.

For the first few days, I just used Alexa as my timer, and it worked pretty well. I noticed that I was able to stay a lot more focused, and waiting until the breaks to check emails wasn't taking away from any of my other work, and it kept me from getting distracted. I started thinking there has to be a better way to track my time than using Alexa, so I started searching for Pomodoro apps. I found quite a few. Some had built-in Kanban-style boards and others integrated with different to-do lists and project management applications. I ended up choosing PomoDoneApp since it was compatible with Todoist which I already use for keeping track of a lot of my to-do's.

PomoDoneApp is also compatible with GitHub which is what I use for all my mobile and web app development. Unfortunately, there was no way to connect it to Azure DevOps that I use at my main clients because theirs is an on-premise installation. Both GitHub and Azure DevOps have agile boards for tracking projects, but they are software specific. Since I am bouncing between software development and infrastructure, I started thinking I needed something to manage my tasks that were a little more generic. Fortunately, PomoDoneApp also integrates with Trello. 

One of the comments about Trello was that it was more generic than Jira, also made by Atlassian, which was really focused on software development. At first, I really didn't want to create another Kanban-style board for managing tasks, but I decided to give it a try. Where Github and Azure manage very granular software tasks, with Trello, I made the tasks very broad and much more generic. That way I am just managing my time that is focused on a project instead of individual tasks. I had thought about just using Todoist, but I really wanted to have more control over the state of the task. In Todoist each item is either a todo or completed. In Trello, I am able to set up an additional workflow. For most of my projects, I have a todo, doing, and done column. This has been really helpful especially when I take a break or when I first come back to my tasks in the morning. I just looking at the doing column and I can instantly remember where I left. off. 

I had thought about dumping Todoist and putting all my todo's in Trello, but when I really thought about it, there are a lot of tasks that I don't want to track to that detail. Another consideration is that Todoist can integrate with Alexa for todos and shopping lists which was the main reason I got the app in the first place. Since it links right to Alexa's shopping list, I can be at the store shopping, and my son can tell Alexa to add something to the list, and it will show up while I am still at the store. 

It seems like a lot of pieces especially since I am using these to manage just my own time, but I am really seeing the benefit of each piece of the puzzle I put together. Now at the end of the day, I know where all my time was spent, and I am getting better at estimating how long things will take. So often I think my quick task didn't have an effect on my productivity, but when I started to realize how fast 25 minutes goes by, I realized that small tasks I thought only took up a few minutes were really wasting hours of my time.

If you are interested in any of the applications I talked about, I have included the links here:



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