Pomodoro tracker

The sheet exists to record what happened, not to plan what should happen. Filling circles after the fact gives you an honest count of how many focused sessions a real day contains, which is almost always lower than people guess.

1. Write the date, then name one task per row as you start it. Use a specific phrasing, "draft section 3 of the report" rather than "report".
2. Set a timer for 25 minutes and work on that one task until it rings. If you switch tasks partway, the session does not count.
3. Fill in one circle when the timer ends, then take a 5 minute break away from the screen.
4. After four filled circles in a row, take a longer break of 15 to 30 minutes before starting the next one.
5. Use the notes column for interruptions and for anything you thought of mid-session and had to park. One or two words is enough.
6. At the end of the day, count the filled circles and write the total. Six sessions is 150 minutes of real focus, which is a good day for most people.

A worked example: a row reading "rewrite onboarding email" ends the morning with two circles filled and "interrupted twice by Slack" in the notes. The next row, "review pull requests", gets three circles and a clean notes column. The day totals five sessions, and the notes make the fix obvious: close Slack during the first block tomorrow.

The 25 minute interval is a convention rather than a research finding, and a strict timer is not always better than stopping when your attention actually breaks. The Time Guide covers the evidence, and the Pomodoro tool lets you set any interval you like.

A single tracker tells you about one day, which is rarely worth much. Five of them in a stack tell you what a normal day holds for you, and that number is the one to plan against. Keep the finished sheets face down beside the printer and go through them once, on the last working day of the week.

Start with the day totals. Write the five figures in a line on the back of the newest sheet and look at the spread rather than the average: a week of four, six, two, five and six has one day that needs explaining, and the explanation is usually already in that day's notes column.

Then read the notes columns end to end, ignoring the tasks. Interruptions repeat, and the same word turning up on three sheets is the only genuine finding a tracker produces. One recurring name, one recurring meeting or one recurring time of day is something you can act on; a general sense that the week was busy is not.

Finally, look for task names that appear on several sheets with one circle each. That pattern means the work is being touched rather than done, and it usually needs a single protected morning instead of five fragments. If nothing repeats and the totals are steady, the sheet has done its job and you can stop keeping them.

Filling circles in advance. It takes five seconds and it quietly converts the sheet from a record into a plan, after which the count measures optimism rather than attention.

Naming a separate row for every small thing. Twelve rows sound generous until replying to four emails has eaten four of them by half past nine. Group the small work under one row called admin and keep the rows for work that genuinely takes a session.

Rounding up. A session you stopped at eighteen minutes is not a circle, and once you allow one exception every later session drifts towards the shortest length you have already accepted.

Competing with yesterday's total. Six circles spent on the wrong task is a worse day than three spent on the right one, and the sheet cannot tell the difference. That judgement stays with you, which is why the notes column matters more than the count.

Giving up after a bad day. A day with one filled circle and three lines of interruptions in the notes is the most useful sheet in the stack, because it is the only one that names what actually costs you the time.

This is the only one of the five sheets that is written on continuously through the day, so it wants to lie flat next to the keyboard rather than hang on a wall. A sheet you have to reach for is a sheet that gets filled in from memory at six o'clock.

The circles are small, and they are the only thing on the sheet you have to mark accurately. A fine ballpoint fills one without spreading into its neighbour; a broad marker does not. A single diagonal stroke reads as clearly as a solid fill from across a desk and takes a fraction of the time.

Leave the printer's multiple-pages-per-sheet option alone for this template. It halves the circle size, and at that scale you cannot tell four filled from five at a glance, which is the one thing a row of circles is for.

The date line at the top right is the only thing that distinguishes one printed copy from another. Write it first, before the first task name, or a week of sheets becomes a pile you cannot put back in order.