I love Saturdays. Waking up in the morning to Saturday morning cartoons is just the thing. At least, it always was when I was growing up. Naturally, as you grow up, such nostalgic things as that become a thing of the past.

Now, being old, those nostalgic mornings are replaced with a new Saturday morning routine of going out for a run. I'm not particularly fast but I love going on my 5k runs on Saturdays. It is pretty hot in Texas, but what can you do. Going out early helps, but naturally the temperature goes up as the day goes on.

Although there's no work on Saturday, I still want to be productive. I learned about a technique called the pomodoro technique. With this pomodoro technique, you set aside a period of time in which you'll focus on the task at hand, putting aside all distractions to focus on that one thing. With this technique, supposedly you can get a lot of things done.

Actually, the word pomodoro means tomato That makes it the tomato technique. Sounds all nutritious and all. Add some pomodoro to your productivity salad, or something. So what you do with the pomodoro technique is set a timer for 25 minutes or something, then concentrate on your task for those minutes, followed by a break of 3-5 minutes. After your break, you do it all over again until the heat death of the universe. Something like that. At some point, you'll have gotton some things done. that's the idea anyway.

The real challenge of the pomodoro technique is figuring out exactly what you need to do before starting. If you don't have your focus on the things you want to concentrate on, you won't have much luck focusing on the task at hand really. After all, if you don't have your task defined. how can you focus on it? Focusing blindly on nothing is the way to get nothing done.

I've tried to use the pomodoro technique now and then. It's effective as long as you have your task defined. As in, you've prepared ahead of time what your tomato focused task happens to be. You'll say soemthing like, write a method that does such and such. Debug such and such problem. Make a commit for such and such. That's where you can get your pomodoro success.

Preparation! Just like Batman. Maybe that's how Batman achieve's his great success in crime fighting. Creating pomodoro - tomatoe things to accomplish, then setting his tomato timer to the 25 minutes. Then he takes his bat-break. 3 to 5 minutes. Way to engage your bat-productivity.

I have another idea. My own version of the pomodoro technique. Keep a crate of tomatoes next to your desk. Then when you get a distraction, utilize one of the tomatoes in your crate to remove the distraction so that you are un-distracted. That's the ultimate pomodoro technique.

There should be some other fruit and vegetable themed techniques. Like, there could be a pineapple technique. A watermelon technique. It could have to do with how long the focus is, or maybe just how focused you are. Instead of pomodoro - tomato, maybe the pineapple technique could be about an hour of focus with 10 minute breaks instead. Then there could be the potato technique, where you don't really focus on what you are working on at all, but instead get distracted by whatever thing passes your way. In other words, the usual technique. The one employed by programmers around the world daily. The ultimate potato technique.

Focusing on your work can be hard when everyone is vying for your attention. That's just how things go I guess. There could be days when someone here or there is asking for your help with this or that. Then you'll be distracted all day. Distractions being a faact of life, you just have to deal with them as they come. Maybe utilize some of those tomatoes from the pomodoro technique.

There should be a reverse pomodoro technique. Maybe the cantaloupe technique. With this cantaloupe technique, instead of spending 25 minutes working then 5 minutes taking a break, you'll spend 5 minutes working then 25 minutes taking a break. Perfect.

That pomodoro is really well suited for people who can work on their own. Not everyone works well that way though. Some people just need to collaborate with otehrs to really get something done. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but it rather goes contrary to the pomoodoro technique.

There are other techniques for productivity. There's a program called TaskWarrior which you can use to keep track of small tasks that you want to accomplish. I use it all the time when I work on big projects. What you do is break up your task into smallish pieces and then add them into TaskWarrior. It runs on the command line, so this is best for people who are already comfortable working on the command line. You add tasks list "task add " something or another, then you get a report of tasks that you need to accomplish list "task next" or some such. Then you get a task report. You can categorize the tasks into projects. You can also run different kinds of reports concerning the tasks you need to do, or the tasks that you have already completed.

TaskWarrior is a nice productivity tool. You can use it on Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, and probably other operating systems. It's just a pretty useful tool.

There are surely other tools which could afford a programmer greater productivity. I can't think of one at the top of my head at the moment. I probably used quite a few of them that I don't remember. This is one of those things where I will probably wake up in the middle of the night and suddenly remember.