Use a kitchen timer to maximize your productivity

I can sometimes find it extremely difficult to stay on task. Unproductive "necessities" like checking email, reading twitter, and blogging often squeeze out the productive hours in my day.

My worst days used to look like this:

• Wake up around 9-10AM
  
• 2 hours in the morning to "get ready" (go for a jog with the dog / take a shower / eat breakfast / check email / etc)
  
• Start work around Noon
  
• Open up Textmate and figure out what I'm doing for the day (15 minutes)
  
• Check twitter / hacker news / reddit (1 hour)
  
• Grab lunch (1 hour)
  
• *maybe* get a few hours worth of work done (2 hours)
  
• Check email and do some administrative stuff (2-4 hours)
  
• Dinner and hang out with friends (1-6 hours)
  
• Spend the rest of the night on twitter / hacker news / reddit / blogs
  
• Go to sleep
  

I felt like I should spend at least 6 hours every day coding and needed something to make sure that would happen. My solution was a kitchen timer. I recently bought one (pictured above) from Amazon.com and I'm pretty happy with it. I find I prefer its mechanical feel and physical presence on my desk to some of the software solutions out there.

In fact, this thing has worked wonders.

Every morning after my run I set the timer for a 60 minutes. That's the time I have to take a shower, get dressed, read email and check twitter, read the news, etc. After that hour is up I close my email client. The rest of the day is spent coding. Online Textmate, my terminal, and Safari are open.

In the afternoon I give myself another 30 minutes to check email, write a blog post, and do anything else I want to do. I'm spending my 30 minutes this afternoon on this post :).

This, along with finding a separate space to work (see my coworking post) have been two of my three most helpful productivity aids. I'll blog about the third tomorrow.