I mentioned this in my newsletter 2020 week 49. I divide every day into 2 morning sessions and 1 afternoon session. Occasionally, I have teaching session in the evening. Or a meeting in the evening. That counts as the 4th focus session of the day.
Time wheel to visualize my focus session
Now I have updated my focus session to be a visualized time wheel. It is a daily time wheel to visualize the day and the focus sessions, as following:
I draw a circle every day. Then I draw 4 lines to divide the circle into 8 segments. The bottom left 2 segments are marked as sleeping time.
On the left and right side, it is 7 am and 7 pm. On the top and bottom side, it is 1pm and 1 am. The upper half is the day. The lower half is the night.
There are 4 segments in the day time. The 1st one is for commune and warm-up. Coffee time in the morning, and plan the day.
The 2nd segment is the golden focus time. It is the only 3-hour long in the minoring to get the most important things done.
The 3rd segment is for lunch and lunch break. My energy is usually low right after lunch. I schedule light tasks after lunch.
The 4th segment is the final boost of the day to finish uncompleted tasks that must be done that day. There is also a commune time in the end of 4th segment.
Then it comes the evening segment. It is either a teaching session, or a running session and then going home.
Pomodoro® for micro-boosts
Each day, there are roughly 5-6 hours to focus per day. It is long and I may easily get distracted. The Pomodoro® comes to rescue the distraction.
The segments define the focus theme of the hours. Then micro-boost defines how each 30 minutes I should spend.
I use Session app on mac to run 25 minutes of boost and then 5 minutes of rest. Session shows the count down on the menu bar.
Theme + micro-boosts
By using the 2 segments theme and micro-boosts per 30 minutes. I can balance my energy and rest. I can also take the rest time to do some side-tracked things while still focus on the theme during most of the time.
