Where Pomodoro meets a spreadhseet
A practical time tracking tool
In the Why I use the Pomodoro Technique, I mentioned how I combine the Pomodoro method with a spreadsheet to track my time. It’s one thing to work in focused 25-minute blocks — but it’s another to plan and evaluate how those blocks add up over time. That’s where the spreadsheet comes in.
From Roles to Reality
Here’s a quote from that article that still sums up my approach:
In many of my roles, I juggle multiple hats—developer, trainer, mentor, etc. To manage my time across these roles, I translate priorities, allocated time into pomodori. One pomodoro is 25 minutes, so two pomodori roughly equal an hour. Over an 8-hour day, I have 16 pomodori to allocate.
Let me take you back a couple of years, when I was working as a Principal Engineer. But honestly, I’ve used this same method even earlier, as a Senior Engineer with multiple responsibilities across projects.
Here’s a sample of the responsibilities I was handling back then:
“Scrum work”
Security project coordination
Principal engineering community work
Mentoring and training
Learning and personal development
Meetings
Ad-hoc or unplanned tasks
Some of these came with agreed-upon time allocations. Security: 20% (one full day/week). Community work: 10%. For the rest, I had to decide what made sense.
This level of granularity helped me intentionally limit how much time was left for ad-hoc work — the biggest sinkhole of productivity if left unchecked.
From Planning to Pomodori
Once I had my areas of responsibility, I translated my weekly capacity into planned hours and Pomodori. For a 40-hour workweek, that means 80 Pomodori.
That’s the planning part. But I didn’t stop there.
Tracking Reality
It’s easy to plan. What’s hard is knowing where your time actually goes.
I could have gotten away with a single line summarizing how many Pomodori I spent. But I preferred a day-by-day breakdown. It gave me a much better sense of how each day unfolded — what drained my focus, what got squeezed, and what flowed well.
Here’s an imaginary week, just for illustration:
This week also shows something important: you don’t have to stick rigidly to the plan. Life happens. Meetings get cancelled. Focus blocks appear out of nowhere. On this week, I ended up spending more time on project work because I had fewer meetings and less ad-hoc chaos than expected.
Why It Works
This simple tool — just a spreadsheet and a Pomodoro mindset — has helped me understand not just where my time goes, but whether that time is aligned with my responsibilities and goals. Sometimes, the results are encouraging. Sometimes, they’re unsettling. (Spoiler: meetings tend to eat more time than I want to admit.)
Final Thoughts
The combination of Pomodoro and spreadsheet planning might sound simple — and it is. But it’s also powerful. It brings visibility, structure, and flexibility to how I work. It helps me stay aligned with priorities. And perhaps most importantly, it helps me say “yes” and “no” more intentionally, based on real constraints — not wishful thinking.