More WTFery Moments

[walkitout]

I'm almost ready to write a review of _Personal Kanban_, but in the appendix, the author mentions the "Pomodoro Technique". I had not previously heard of this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique

However, in a previous life as a programmer, I definitely worked this way: I'd get up about once every half hour, go get a cup of tea and do something minor before diving back in. I couldn't possibly sustain focus much longer than a half hour, and if I broke up the focus more frequently, I couldn't finish anything significant. And sandwiched around sets of these (more typically 3 than 4) were meals, stints of answering e-mail or someone's questions and so forth. On days where the interrupts came too fast, I didn't even try to do anything substantive; it was pointless.

The idea that this gets written up, studies, promulgated as A Technique etc. just leaves me all dizzy and disoriented, sort of like Allen's remark about people need to learn how to touch type.

Comments

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

That's the thing, though. A lot of people don't do this automatically. I certainly don't, not at home anyway (maybe I kind of did this at work, where it was sort of set up that way anyhow).

I remember reading up on the Pomodoro Technique a couple of years ago, and trying to get E. to do it (she wasn't keen). I keep thinking I should try it myself. I suspect I'll just keep forgetting to reset the timer and what not, and have yet another thing to feel guilty about.

I think one reason my son's doing better in school this year (knock wood -- average currently 88.5%) is that his handwriting has finally gotten fast enough that it isn't a total chore for him to get things onto paper. I previously got the impression he was forgetting the end of the sentence he was trying to write by the time he got to the middle. Or maybe his short-term memory has improved. Or both. Anyway, getting his typing faster (which seems to be happening as well) is also on the agenda.

Good to know

[walkitout]

I definitely agree that handwriting is a horrible impediment to getting ideas down on paper. When I was quite young, I tried to convince my parents to let me use one of the two manual typewriters in the house to learn how to type. No dice. So I took the (this is actually a little weird to write down) typewriting textbook someone had bought at a garage sale (goddess, I hope it wasn't me), and taught myself how to touch type using the full-size layout on paper. I eventually convinced my parents to relent, once I showed them I could touch type. When I got to junior high, I took keyboarding, because I knew it would be an easy A and good practice, and I kept taking keyboarding through high school, on the premise that working office jobs was less lame than working fast food, and also because my older sister said that her professors were telling her and her fellow students in the computer science department that learning type type quickly and accurately could make a big difference in their careers (as programmers). At the time, I was getting a bunch of opposing messages from women who had office jobs who had very carefully not learned how to type well and quickly, so as to avoid getting stuck in secretarial jobs. All very strange.

Anyway. I'm a huge fan of switching to composing at a keyboard as quickly as possible, despite my continued tendency to use paper spiral notebooks for list making -- a habit I am very, very slowly trying to break myself of, mostly with Evernote.

ETA: Oh, and I never used a timer when I did that half hour block thing at work -- that was just a very natural length of time between cups of tea/water/whatever. I actually thought I had a _shorter_ attention span than everyone else. Part of the wtfery for me is realizing this is considered a _long_ time to concentrate.