> …I find that spontanous and needed dailly verbal communication in a team is hard to plan for…

Agreed, and that is one of the reasons why I decided to try other techniques as well.

Perhaps. But I find that spontanous and needed dailly verbal communication in a team is hard to plan for. Mail communication probably is though.

>I personally use a notebook and a nice pen.

Phew. Nope. Not for me I think. And I don’t think it is flexible since I like to list things in prioritized orders, kind of like a Scrum backlog. Computers are good tools for reordering stuff quickly. Pen and paper are not. :) I guess tough that I can reevaluation if ordering is really necessary for a brief todo-list.

Re: Pomodoro and programming. In my experience, Pomodoro works really well when I have a lot of different tasks, such as communication. By prioritizing those tasks along with programming, and scheduling them all for pomodoros, it does not matter whether I finished a programming task or not. What is important is that I am happy with my prioritization and that I get to check off a number of pomodoros.

Re: to-do list and tools. I personally use a notebook and a nice pen. Nothing is more flexible. I also like the Emergent Task Planner from the PCEO series referenced above for doing my daily planning.

I have tried out the pomodoro technique too, and I think it works if you only do programming and nothing else. Usually though there’s a lot of necessary communication that needs to be done during the day. Taking that “pomodoro mind break” then becomes frustrating since I feel I have not done any coding at all… :(.

Well, I will continue to think I guess. But thanks for the tool hints and your thoughts on the area!

PS. In my frustration, I’ve even started building my own tailor made to-do list since I’ve never come across such a tool that works as I would like it to work…