Pomodoro / Focus Session Tracker

Rows and circles

Eight task rows by default, six circles against each one, plus a notes column. A header bar carries the date and one focus goal for the day, and there is a summary block at the foot that you can turn off.

The session and break lengths print on the sheet and are yours to set. Twenty-five and five are the classic numbers; nothing forces you to use them.

How the method runs

Pick a task. Set a timer. Work on that one thing until it goes off, then fill in a circle and take the short break. Four sessions in, take a longer one.

The circle is the whole mechanism. A session either happened or it did not — you cannot half-fill it, and you cannot claim one for twenty-five minutes with a phone in it — so by lunchtime you have an honest count of how much focused work you have actually done, which is usually less than it felt like and considerably more informative.

Estimating before you start

Write the task, then decide how many circles it should take, then mark that many with a light pencil dot.

Doing this makes you an appalling estimator for about a fortnight and a decent one after that. Nearly everyone is optimistic at first, by roughly a factor of two, and the only cure is a written record of the gap between the guess and the count.

Twenty-five minutes, or not

Twenty-five is short enough that starting feels easy, which is the point — it was chosen to beat procrastination rather than to match any research on attention.

Deep work with a long warm-up often wants fifty minutes with a ten-minute break. Fifteen suits a task you are actively avoiding, or a child. Both are on the sheet because the right interval is the one you will actually finish, and that is personal.

The break is not optional

Stand up. Leave the desk. Look at something more than a few metres away.

Scrolling a phone for five minutes is not a break in any sense that helps — same posture, same screen distance, same demands on attention, and you return more depleted than you left. The whole rhythm depends on the recovery half working, and skipping it turns the method into an ordinary long afternoon with circles drawn on it.

The notes column

Use it for what interrupted you. A tally of interruptions across a week is the most useful thing this sheet produces, because most of them turn out to be the same three, and two of them are usually preventable.

Print one a day. It takes a minute to fill in at the start and tells you something true at the end.