—  Science  Art
 

Visual Schedule ?

Visual Schedule ?

I have been using a countdown timer that breaks my time up into different work and break segments. I have (mainly) gone with a 52/17 work/break schedule based on “science says“. Well, prompted by reading that article and then trying it and finding that it actually is quite effective (for me). I used this interval timer (actually designed for athletes doing high-intensity interval training (HIIT)), as I liked that you can create your own custom intervals and label them and choose colors and then it can run fullscreen.

20 minutes left in my final work block…

I have tried things like pomodoro timers before, but I find I operate better with a slightly longer working period and also a longer break period. The benefits of the longer break for me are:

  1. Easier to offload non-relevant but slightly time sensitive tasks into this interval. Need to book a flight? You can do that in 17 minutes. Sometimes I use it to do a short yoga routine, which also has the benefit of getting my out of my chair.
  2. If you end up going a couple of minutes into it you still have a significant break, whereas when you are doing a 25/5, or similar, if you go into your break a bit then suddenly you don’t really have a break.
  3. It’s something to look forward to. If you are halfway through a work segment and not in the mood, 17 min off is a significant carrot, as it is enough time to really reset – I’ve even used this time to take a power nap.

My Visual Schedule

The “full day” schedule view

The process of making my visual schedule, which is essentially an extension of the interval timer (just for the whole day), was quite straight forward:

  1. I used Google sheets to write out a daily schedule. You can see my schedule here.
  2. I wrote a script in Processing, well technically in p5.js, which is essentially Javascript.
  3. Uploaded to github for your (immense) pleasure.
Single session schedule view

You can see what I am up to right now, at this link (not working on mobile).