Two terms in the title that needs clarification. Pomodoro is a technique for managing a task completion, or simply time. Yak shaving is a situation that everyone finds himself every now and than when we are trying to solve a problem in a wrong way. Usually it happens when we create a chain of tasks that will lead to a solution and we keep on repeating it until we get somewhere. Eventually we could end up with a very crazy solution after a long period of time.
Yak shaving
An example of Yak shaving I found myself in not too long ago.
I found myself doing a Ruby on Rails development on a Mac box. As I used older version of MacOS I had an older version of Ruby compiler. To use latest version of Rails I had to get newer version of Ruby. To get that I needed to install that via Mac Ports or something similar. While trying to install Mac Ports I found myself missing some of the development files that stopped Mac Ports from installation. It turned out that those files where in XCode. I had to find XCode that is going to work on my machine. Turned out that older version is available on Apple Dev website, all I need is to sign-in. I had an account, but forgot the password. Then I tried to retrieve a password and that didn’t work. After some battles I finally got a XCode on my box. It was still Mac Ports impossible to install Mac Ports thought. That took me along time. Eventually I ended up installing VM image of Ubuntu and developing on Linux VM.
I think that being developer, the Yak Shaving problem is very irritating and could lead into a lot of wasted hours. When working in a pair, the Yak issue will not appear that often. There is always a second pair of eyes to validate the sanity of the task in progress. It doesn’t eliminate the Yak entirely as I found out with some peers 🙂
When working alone that is entirely different story. Because there is no one to run you ideas by, sometime I make a decisions that lead me into “the shaving“. I found myself wasting hours before realizing that it doesn’t make sense and taking step back.
Pomodoro, mmm, delicious
Not to long ago on a project I was working on, we used Pomodoro to keep us focus for a period of time. This simple technique combines 25 minutes of un-distractable time of work and a 5 minutes break. After 4 successful Pomodoros (25 minutes + 5 minutes break) we had a little longer break. While working in a pairs, Pomodoro was keeping us focus and safe from emails, phone calls and coffee breaks. The 5 minutes break gave us a lot of time to discuss the issues around the task/problem.
When working alone the 5 minutes break could be the excellent opportunity to talk with someone else about the problem or just take a step back and reflect on a solution. This eventually could lead into new ideas and most importantly into STOP shaving a Yak.
There is more to Pomodoro technique than just a sanity check from a yak shaving. There is a free PDF book that can be downloaded for free http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/resources/cirillo/ThePomodoroTechnique_v1-3.pdf and some other resources on the Pomodoro Technique web site.
Cheers, Gregster
Why was I trying to speed it up on a first place. Well, some of you might be aware of the fact that me and my Family moved to Sydney. We will be here until May. My blog and my hosting is in UK. Broadband in Oz is far below random average back in UK. I was never bothered to check my own blog for response time as it was always good. Trying to load my blog main page I was shocked waiting for few minutes for it to appear on a screen. 
When I finished I had to go trough all the plugins and comment out the JavaScript imports. Finished with this task I moved to getting all the JS files in a header as one compressed file. So in other hands all the plugin JavaScripts would be compressed and loaded in one file. 
Greg Gigon's wEbLOG 