Planning a day in focus sessions

Why plan in sessions

A to-do list tells you what you’d like to do, but not whether it fits. Planning in focus sessions turns your time into something you can count. If you have six sessions free today, you can put six sessions of work into them, not twelve. It also makes choices visible: when something new comes in, you can see which planned session it would replace.

Estimating in sessions is part of the original Pomodoro Technique. You guess how many rounds a task will take, compare that with how many it really took, and get better at guessing over time.¹ You don’t need the rest of the method to use the idea, but it helps to know how the technique works.

When to plan

A day plan takes five or ten minutes. Some people like to make it at the end of the previous day, while they still remember what’s unfinished. Others prefer first thing, once they know what the morning holds. Either works. What matters is that the plan exists before the day starts pulling you in different directions.

Keep it short. A plan that takes half an hour to write is a plan you’ll soon stop making.

Count what you actually have

Start with your calendar, not your list. Look at the free stretches between meetings, classes and other commitments, and count how many sessions fit in each one, breaks included.

Be conservative. A 25-minute session and its 5-minute break take half an hour, so a free hour holds two sessions and a 90-minute gap holds three. Gaps of twenty minutes or less are usually better for quick jobs than for a session.

A day often has fewer real sessions in it than it seems to at first glance. That’s worth knowing at nine in the morning rather than discovering at five in the afternoon.

Estimate in sessions

For each task, guess how many sessions it will take. Rough numbers are fine: one, two, three, “probably four”. Writing the estimate down matters more than getting it right, because without a record there’s nothing to compare with later.

Expect your estimates to be optimistic. Psychologists call this the planning fallacy: people tend to underestimate how long their own tasks will take, even when similar tasks have run over before.² In one well-known study, students predicting when they would finish their theses were, on average, about three weeks too optimistic, and fewer than a third finished by the date they had predicted.²

Two habits help:

• Break big tasks down. If a task needs more than four or five sessions, split it into parts you can estimate separately.
• Compare afterwards. When a task is done, look at how many sessions it really took. Over a few weeks, your estimates become more realistic.

Choose what goes first

With sessions counted and tasks estimated, you’ll usually find more work than room. Pick the tasks that matter most today and give them the first sessions, before smaller requests fill the day. A useful question is: if only one thing got done today, which would you want it to be? That task gets the first session.

Then decide when each one starts. Research on implementation intentions, plans of the form “when X happens, I’ll do Y”, suggests that deciding when and where you’ll act makes people more likely to follow through.³ For a day plan, that can be as simple as “after the ten o’clock meeting, two sessions on the report”.

Work on one task per session. If a task finishes early, use the remaining minutes to review what you’ve done or to get the next task ready, rather than starting something unrelated.

Leave room for the unexpected

A plan that fills every session is likely to break by mid-morning. Leave one or two sessions unassigned for whatever comes up: a request you can’t put off, a task that took longer than you thought, or simply a longer break when you need one. How much slack you need depends on the day. If you’re often interrupted, leave more. On a quiet day with few meetings, one free session may be enough.

If the slack goes unused, that’s a good day. Pull the next task forward, or finish a little early.

When the plan breaks

It will, regularly. When it does, re-plan the rest of the day rather than giving up on the plan:

1. 01Count the sessions you have left today.
2. 02Look at what’s still on the list and what each item still needs.
3. 03Choose what fits, and move the rest to tomorrow on purpose.

Moving a task isn’t a failure. It’s what the plan is for: making the trade-offs visible while you can still choose between them.

Look back at the end of the day

Before you finish, take two minutes to look back:

• How many sessions did you actually do, compared with how many you planned?
• Which estimates were off, and by how much?
• What interrupted you, and could any of it be moved or batched tomorrow?

You’re not grading yourself. You’re collecting information that makes tomorrow’s plan a little more accurate, and that makes the next estimate a little less optimistic.

An example day

Say you have a meeting from ten to eleven, lunch from half past twelve until half past one, and a call at three. That leaves room for about eight sessions of 25 minutes. A plan might look like this:

• Two sessions from nine: draft the report’s introduction.
• Two sessions from eleven: finish the first draft.
• One session before lunch: reply to the morning’s messages in one batch.
• Two sessions after lunch: review the slides for Thursday.
• One session left free for whatever comes up.

The report gets the morning because it matters most and needs the most thought. Messages wait for a single session rather than leaking into every hour. And if the report takes five sessions instead of four, the free session absorbs it.

Doing it in Tomatino

In Tomatino’s Tasks, you can add tasks for today, give each one an estimate in sessions, and choose which task you’re working on before you start. Each finished session counts towards that task, so you can compare the estimate with what it really took. Your tasks are saved on this device, and an account is only needed if you want them on your other devices too.